The speed with which the Afghan government collapsed and the Taliban moved in seemed to come as a shock to everyone … except for every single soldier who spent time in the country working with people on the ground. While the brass at the Pentagon and intelligence officers at multiple agencies seem to have believed there would be some effort to preserve the government the United States and its allies had put in place, everyone who actually put their boots on the dusty landscape appears to understand the simple truth: That government was always a fiction.

On Monday, President Joe Biden stepped forward to own the decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan completely and, no matter how quick somewhere to conflate his evident disdain for the Afghan military with a disregard for the Afghan people, there’s a good deal to admire in Biden’s action. Not only did this action end an ultimately pointless and costly military occupation whose continuance would represent no measurable benefit to the nation, but Biden owned it. He didn’t blame those intelligence officials who told him that the Afghan government would put up a fight. He didn’t sort his staff for someone to finger as a source for bad advice. Even though that action invites criticism, he put the buck for this decision right on the Resolute Desk. That’s a return to form that everyone should definitely welcome.

It’s not as if he had to. After all, Biden could have easily shrugged this off as just following through on what Trump already put in place. The same Taliban leader now running the show in Kabul is the man Trump invited to Camp David—the same man freed from jail at Trump’s request. And it’s not as if it was the only time a Republican leader screwed this thing six ways from Sunday.

In 2001, George W. Bush not only turned down a Taliban offer to hand over bin Laden, but also rejected the surrender of the Taliban itself.

In advance of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Bush demanded that the Taliban hand over bin Laden and others involved in al Qaeda. However, as The New York Times reported on October 2, 2001, the Taliban government in Afghanistan refused to turn over bin Laden “without proof he was involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.” That demand was flatly rejected.

As CNN reported five days later, they countered U.S. demands by offering to try bin Laden themselves. Not surprisingly, that proposal was also swiftly rejected. Following this, Taliban leaders, including the organization’s co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, proposed that the United States present evidence of bin Laden’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks to an agreed-upon third party and that bin Laden be tried before an Islamic court in some nation other than Afghanistan. Bush also rejected that response. Airstrikes began.

A week after that, The Guardian reported that Taliban leaders signaled renewed willingness to turn over bin Laden, though they still insisted that they would only hand him to a third country. This clearly seemed like a face-saving maneuver on the Taliban’s part—as well as a desperate attempt to halt the city-smashing military onslaught—but Bush was having none of it. A day later, Bush made it official, issuing a proclamation which began, ‘‘When I said no negotiations, I meant no negotiations.” 

As the airstrikes turned to invasion, the Taliban was driven from power in one city after another. And by the beginning of December, they made another offer—they would surrender. Not only bin Laden, but the entire Taliban.

As The New York Times reported on December 7, 2001, the Taliban offered to surrender its final stronghold at Kandahar, hand over its weapons, and renounce terrorism. Kandahar was where the Taliban movement had originated and was home to several of its leaders. Leaders of the Taliban offered to step aside in exchange for being allowed to “live with dignity” in their home city.

Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld immediately rejected the offer of the Taliban’s surrender. Instead, Rumsfeld insisted that the “U.S. military campaign would continue vigorously, and for some time.” In the meantime, he called on U.S.-backed Afghan leaders to punish the Taliban commanders using “whatever form justice takes” and saying that this would satisfy Bush.

Throughout those early days of the conflict, Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar was frequently the connection through which the organization’s communications were made. In fact, for years after the invasion, he was said to be in almost daily communication with U.S.-backed Afghan President Hamid Karzai. A widely reported story in Afghanistan insisted that Barada had saved Karzai’s life during the early days of the war so that he could preserve an Afghan-led government.

In 2010, Barada was located in Karachi, Pakistan, and arrested during a raid by a group that may (or may not, it’s still unclear) have included U.S. forces. As the BBC reported at the time, this came after a change of Pakistan’s government in 2008 had increasingly strained the relationship with the U.S. and boosted Pakistani support for the Taliban. Barada’s arrest and subsequent sentencing to prison seemed like a signal that Pakistan was still willing to cooperate in fighting the Taliban … even if it did so rather quietly. On the other hand, Karzai was supposedly furious that Barada was being held because the arrest apparently came in the midst of renewed talks intended to negotiate peace between the Afghan government and the Taliban.

That idea was given renewed substance in November 2018 when Donald Trump opened his own negotiations with the Taliban to push Pakistan to release Barada. Barada immediately moved to Qatar and took over as the diplomatic envoy for the Taliban in negotiations with Trump. Just days before the anniversary of 9/11 in 2019, Trump planned a series of “secret” meetings with the Taliban at Camp David.  Though not actually secret in that Trump sent out a whole series of tweets claiming that Taliban leaders and then Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had been slated to arrive over the weekend when were then canceled after Trump and Barada traded demands over a cease-fire.

“They probably don’t have the power to negotiate a meaningful agreement anyway,” mocked Trump. “How many more decades are they willing to fight?” A day later, Trump declared negotiations with the Taliban “dead.”

Four months later, Trump signed a deal with the Taliban. As part of that deal, the U.S. and NATO would withdraw all forces. Trump also asked Pakistan and Afghan officials to release over 5,000 Taliban prisoners. Those former prisoners were among the men who invaded Kabul on Monday. The next president of Afghanistan is likely to be Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.

If, in the wake of 9/11, what the United States had actually wanted was to see Osama bin Laden tried for his involvement and al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan disassembled, that could likely have happened without a single U.S. service member dying and perhaps without a bomb being dropped. However, a trial of bin Laden in Saudi Arabia or Qatar would not have even come close to quelling the anger following 9/11. So that didn’t happen.

Two months into the conflict, if the United States had actually wanted Afghanistan to be brought to peace under terms that were likely to generate something like stability, it’s very likely that could have happened. But by then, it would not have satisfied a narrative that had equated any negotiation in Afghanistan with surrendering to terrorists. So that didn’t happen.

That may have been the last chance to leave Afghanistan at a point that would not immediately result in a Taliban resurgence. Every action taken after the end of 2001 only made the Taliban stronger and made their return to power more certain. 

Now it’s happened. 

And, of course, it’s a tragedy. It’s a horrific tragedy. What it means for every woman and girl in Afghanistan, what it means for every person in Afghanistan who believed that something better could be built, what it means for everyone trapped right now at the Kabul airport desperately trying to leave is an inestimable horror. Just a horror.

Reports from the Associated Press this morning that the Taliban intends to honor women’s rights “within Islamic Law” are not exactly reassuring because these are the same people—Barada included—who previously interpreted that law in a way that was horribly abusive, repressive, and belittling. Taliban spokesmen also made it clear that any illusion of a free press in Afghanistan is over, as journalists would be expected to “not work against national values.”

Meanwhile, CNN reports chaos at the Kabul airport. The Taliban controls all the roads leading to the airport, the U.S. controls a section cordoned off by razor wire, and no commercial flights operating. Evacuation flights from the airport remain underway. Both the U.K. and German governments have troops on the ground at the airport as they try to arrange flights for Afghans desperately seeking to escape. And while Biden may have taken ownership of most of the situation, he certainly had excuses for the messy evacuation, blaming the now-defunct Afghan government for not beginning evacuations sooner because, according to Biden, they did not want to trigger “a crisis of confidence.” Biden appears to have bought into that argument.

Considering where things stand, that seems like the last thing that should have concerned anyone.