The inevitable surrender and withdrawal of American, British, and NATO forces in Afghanistan has been met with a mixture of incredulity, incandescence, and predictable ignorance. Much of it, in Britain, has centered on the shambolic process itself; President Joe Biden a useful whipping “geriatric” for a foam-flecked media, which had so overwhelmingly supported the bitter shambles and chaos of a fruitless war of twenty-one years that cost over $2.3 trillion and over 240,000 lives, 71,000 of them civilians. (The wars and counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan have cost the United States a truly eye-watering $6.4 trillion, according to a US inspectorate report.)

Everyone, it seems, has had their say — apart from those who now lie in their graves. We have witnessed the impotent bluster of parliamentarians, some of whom were just out of short trousers when the first US forces landed in Kabul. We have been subjected to inchoate attempts to argue for Britain to continue to hold the red line indefinitely, by those such as former Tory MP and resident Afghanistan expert Rory Stewart. He even cited the continued American presence in South Korea as an example to credulous media hosts.

We have listened to a new generation of Labour politicians, including the shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy, claiming that Britain’s original decision to join the United States in what was supposedly an anti-insurgency operation to remove Bin Laden and al-Qaeda from the rocky fastness of Tora Bora was “the right one.” And above all there has been the attempt to rewrite history, to spin and to obfuscate, because the emperor really does have no clothes: the best garment to grab is the fiction that somehow we went to war to get girls into school. (Little mention, of course, of the thousands of women and girls killed by US and coalition bombings in Afghanistan — the most recent of which in Kabul killed ten civilians.)