The United States has finally left Afghanistan – twenty years after the original failed mission to bring Osama Bin Laden and his criminal gang to justice morphed into a nation-building project, breathtaking in scope and ambition. The national humiliation over the chaos that attended the withdrawal itself will without a doubt linger for some time, but the larger question is whether this long-overdue withdrawal will trigger more than endless forensics of punditry as to what went wrong and when. Rather, we need genuine soul-searching as to why this great country has found itself at this juncture at this time, and what must be done to regain our footing and move forward.
