President Joe Biden and his team of advisers were reportedly shocked at how quickly the Afghan government and military fell to Taliban forces once the United States withdrew from the region. I have a hard time believing this since military officials at the very top of the chain of command have known for years that this is what would happen.

A couple of years ago, the Washington Post published the Afghanistan papers, a trove of government documents that revealed our military establishment knew our efforts to prop up the Afghan government and train its military were failing. Several high-ranking generals confirmed that the initial invasion and its subsequent mission — to empower the Afghan people to fight off the Taliban on their own — was doomed to fail because America was essentially trying to change the priorities forcibly of a people whose values were very different from our own.