I served for a year in Afghanistan , in 2011, as chief of an intelligence community base along the Pakistan -Afghanistan border. The Afghan desk was my first assignment for the intelligence community in 1993. I have worked in and around the region for many years, both from the field and in headquarters-based assignments.

In turn, I hope to carry some credibility when I say that the 12-page National Security Council document released last week regarding the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was an unfortunate mess. Indeed, it was a fairy tale that has managed to upset just about everyone I know who has served in Afghanistan.

I’m generally quite a firm supporter of the Biden administration’s foreign policy. Still, the August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan was a debacle. Pure and simple. What happened was heart-wrenching for even the hardest of American warriors. The U.S. government and the White House, in particular, need to take significant responsibility for what occurred. Team Biden seems to have found its sea legs after Afghanistan, as with their great success in Ukraine. But make no mistake about it, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was this presidency's low point.

The 12-page document is political talking points and cheerleading. It's defensive in nature and likely designed in anticipation of grueling congressional hearings that will take place in the coming months.

Missing in the 12-page document is the fact that so many senior intelligence and military officials absolutely wanted a residual presence left behind in Afghanistan — 2,500 U.S. special operations and intelligence personnel would have been enough to ensure a requisite counterterrorism force. Enough to give the Afghan security forces confidence to maintain their front-line fight. Nobody I know in the government thought that a full withdrawal was a good idea.

Nobody.

We are left now without an embassy in Kabul. Among other challenges, that means very few, if any, intelligence community "boots on the ground." We obviously also now lack Afghan special operations personnel to support our own forces. Instead, what we have are unmanned aircraft that can work for one-off strikes (such as the operation that killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri). This is not sufficient, however, for a long-haul campaign of repeated strikes on the terrorist foot soldiers. You need to cut off the head of the snake as well as "mow the grass," as the Israelis like to say. Note, here, the recent comments by Gen. Michael Kurilla, U.S. Central Command's commanding general, that ISIS forces in Afghanistan will have an external attack capability in Europe and Asia within six months. Terrorist safe havens in ungoverned spaces are not a problem — until they are, and then it’s too late.

Yes, the Trump administration negotiated the Doha accords, one of the worst agreements in U.S. diplomatic history, that will forever stain those involved in it. Yes, the Taliban repeatedly violated the agreement after it was signed. But why didn't the Biden administration then abandon that accord in kind? The notion that the administration was somehow bound to former President Donald Trump’s folly makes no sense.

This debacle matters for Afghan lives as well as American ones. We must not forget our Afghan allies, many thousands of whom were left behind. This reality tortures very many U.S. military and intelligence personnel. We are alive today because of our Afghan partners' long service of bravery alongside us. The chaos of those final days, so viscerally underlined by the images out of Kabul airport, testifies to a catastrophic ethical failure by the U.S. government. I'm sorry, but one cannot simply gloss this over. The failure in long-term planning for the evacuation of our Afghan allies, despite veterans groups and nongovernmental organizations pleading for months with the administration to do more, cannot and should not be erased from memory.

Leadership means owning one’s mistakes. I wrote a book on this and teach the same concept across the country. The public generally responds positively to those who take ownership of their failures. Deflecting, scapegoating, blaming others — it just doesn’t cut it.

There was just far too much blame placed on the Trump administration in the NSC document. Trump was not in power. The Biden administration was not beholden to reinforcing Trump’s foreign policy mistakes. President Joe Biden was elected, after all, to fix those mistakes. And he has done so in spectacular fashion at times, such as with his reinvigorating of NATO and rallying support to Ukraine. But here, the president will rightfully be criticized by Republicans and, I predict, by some other Democrats (certainly in private).

The Biden administration would be smart to walk this document back, and quickly.