For more than two years, the Biden administration has been anything but transparent about its role in the failures that enabled the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan on Aug. 15, 2021, and the Islamic State suicide attack that killed 13 U.S. service members and 170 Afghans just 11 days later. In an incredible feat of research, Jerry Dunleavy and James Hasson have assembled many of these missing details in Kabul : The Untold Story of Biden’s Fiasco and the American Warriors Who Fought to the End. The result is an excoriating view of President Joe Biden’s poorly managed withdrawal and its far-reaching domestic, geopolitical, and personal consequences.

Hasson and Dunleavy pull no punches regarding Biden’s culpability for our failure in Afghanistan. Highlighting key blunders from his time as a senator and vice president, the authors demonstrate that “nothing in Biden’s forty-eight-year political career … provided any reassurance that he was capable of navigating a national security decision such as the withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

In fairness, the authors also correctly assess that the disastrous Doha Agreement, negotiated between the United States and Taliban at the behest of former President Donald Trump, “paved the way for the slow-moving train wreck” of August 2021. Trump’s chosen negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, “through a unique combination of mendacity and ineptitude,” created a “flawed yet conditional” deal that would “take effect only after the Taliban fulfilled several concrete obligations.”

On taking office, the Biden administration treated the Doha Agreement as though it were binding despite the Taliban's failure to uphold their own obligations. The president and his team plunged forward with the withdrawal, “shap[ing] the realities of the battlefield around [Biden’s] decision instead of vice versa.”

In its fervor, Biden’s team made nonsensical decisions, including removing the contractor workforce that the Afghan military required to function and abandoning the well-defended Bagram Airfield. These choices were compounded by inaccurate assessments of on-the-ground conditions, such as consistent overestimates of the Afghan military’s size and failure to see through Taliban leaders’ assurances that they would not seek military takeover, even as Taliban fighters seized districts, provinces, and, finally, Kabul.

Dunleavy and Hasson demonstrate how these and a host of additional unforced errors led to the utter chaos that met Army paratroopers, Marines, SEALs, Navy corpsmen, and Air Force pararescuemen who arrived at Hamid Karzai International Airport in August 2021 to mitigate the crushing flood of humans desperate to escape an Afghanistan under Taliban control. Hasson and Dunleavy depict with brutal detail the uncertainty, terror, and moral harm service members faced as they attempted to establish order while witnessing people being trampled to death and dying of heatstroke or suffocation and watching Talibs who were providing security at the airport openly executing Afghans.

Dunleavy and Hasson pay particular attention to the final days of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and the suicide attack at Abbey Gate on Aug. 26, 2021. The authors provide details of various controversies surrounding the Abbey Gate attack, such as the origin of AK-47 gunfire heard after the explosion and testimony from Marine snipers who had a person matching the suicide bomber's description in their sights but were not given approval from their chain of command to engage the target. They also note that the president has never publicly named the attack’s perpetrator, ISIS-K member Abdul Rahman al Logari, who had escaped from Bagram prison after it came under Taliban control.

For many, the most devastating omission about the Abbey Gate bombing is Biden’s treatment of the Gold Star families. In addition to staring at his watch while sons’ and daughters’ caskets were escorted onto U.S. soil, Biden has never said the 13 fallen service members’ names aloud. “The [Gold Star] families we interviewed made one thing painfully clear: the president of the United States didn’t just fail to pay proper respect to those thirteen fallen warriors, he actively disrespected them,” the authors write. Kabul fittingly concludes with a tribute to these young men and women, whose “names must be known and their memory … preserved.”

Kabul arrives at an important junction. Having faced little backlash for the human impact of its failed withdrawal, the Biden administration now continues to push engagement with the disingenuous Taliban, which, once again, provide safe haven to al Qaeda terrorists and deprive Afghans of basic human rights. Engaged Americans should read Kabul and join with the veterans, service members, Gold Star families, evacuation volunteers, and policy advocates who demand answers about the decision-making that risked American and Afghan allies’ lives and damaged the country’s reputation on the world stage.

Beth Bailey ( @BWBailey85 ) is a freelance contributor to Fox News Digital and the co-host of The Afghanistan Project, which takes a deep dive into the tragedy wrought in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.