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In the lead-up to Kabul’s fall, President Joe Biden’s most memorable quote appears to be his answer on July 8 to a reporter’s question about an assessment from the intelligence community that Afghanistan’s government teetered on the brink of collapse.

“That is not true,” the commander in chief insisted. “They did not reach that conclusion. … There is going to be no circumstance where you see people lifted off the roof of an embassy. … The likelihood that you’re going to see the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”

The Taliban obviously had other ideas. On Sunday they rolled into Kabul with surprising ease to topple the Afghan government, sending thousands of desperate civilians, many of whom had worked with our military, scrambling to the airport.

Biden’s remark about helicopters on the embassy roof was a reference to this country’s humiliating scramble to get out of Vietnam in 1975. A few weeks later, news media were running photos of that Saigon withdrawal with images of an American Chinook helicopter hovering over our embassy in Kabul during another disastrous withdrawal.

Now the familiar rituals of recriminations and finger-pointing begin. After 20 years and two presidents from each party, there are plenty of targets.

But, as difficult as the mission to end America’s involvement in Afghanistan has been, it is Biden who gets stuck with the blame for its chaotic execution.

In his televised statement, a day earlier, Biden tried to shift blame to his predecessor Donald Trump, who forged an agreement with the Taliban to withdraw by May 1. Biden pushed that back to coincide with the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. But since the Taliban wasn’t honoring the agreement, Biden wasn’t particularly obligated either.

Even if the U.S. had broken the deal, it would not necessarily mean we would need to send more troops to join the roughly 2,500 American military “advisors” already in the country. We might have continued the existing state of affairs by using air cover to contain Taliban advances before they invaded the cities.

But, after 20 years of war, Biden was too impatient for that. In a sentiment that undoubtedly reflects a strong majority of Americans, he said, “One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country.”

Indeed, we have heard similar sentiments from Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, each of whom promised to protect democracy without “nation-building,” even as they tried to do both in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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