President Joe Biden has turned a strategic withdrawal from Afghanistan into an ignominious capitulation — or worse.

The events of recent weeks in Afghanistan raise critical questions about America’s longest war, the evolving Islamist terrorist threat, the limits of American power, and failures in U.S. global leadership. But it would be a mistake to draw grand conclusions from the immediate disaster that has unfolded in Kabul. Whatever the answers to the big questions, the catastrophe now before us was completely avoidable.