When I was a boy, every high-schooler learned in World History the phrase, “Afghanistan, where empires go to die”. The failed occupations of the tribal area between central and south Asia are so numerous that the subject would require a history class all its own. But we were taught that Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Mongols and British had all tried futilely to extend their civilizations into those barren lands.

Apparently though, none of the Ivy-educated ‘elites’ and their dupes who run America’s foreign policy, intelligence and defense establishments were paying attention in class. Not even the more recent, decade-long, failed occupation by the once-mighty USSR beginning in 1979, for which the U.S. boycotted the Olympics in Moscow, registered with our ruling ‘elites’.

Of course it was a righteous cause after 9/11 to punish the Taliban for providing safe haven for Al Qaeda and more crucially, to kill Osama Bin Laden and his followers. But by May 2003, when G.W. Bush (Yale, Harvard) landed on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to declare, ``Mission Accomplished”, Bin Laden had escaped into Pakistan, the one nuclear-armed Islamic nation on the globe, where we dared not pursue.

The fiasco that allowed Bin Laden to escape through the passes of Tora Bora while our Army’s 10th Mountain Division and Marine Expeditionary forces sat for over a week awaiting orders at nearby airfields is a pathetic case study in our ruling class’s timidity and incompetence.

These geniuses thought it better to deploy local warlords, bribed and coordinated by the CIA, to blast Bin Laden from the Afgahn side of the border into Pakistan with Soviet-era artillery. The operation could not have been more poorly conceived had the goal been to enable Bin Laden’s escape into Pakistan - which, by the way, many believe it was.

By June 2003 our mission had morphed into a doomed crusade to deliver Jeffersonian democracy and liberal Western values to a medieval culture based for thousands of years on first-cousin marriage - think Hatfields and McCoys on steroids. The humiliation America is now enduring from our misbegotten Afghanistan folly was predetermined from that day forward.

Our Afghanistan and Iraq fiascoes are without question the greatest strategic blunders in United States history. That it has taken 20 years for the Washington establishment to accept this reality is another testament to our ‘elite’s’ ineptitude. Joe Biden’s choosing the 20th anniversary of 9/11 - which was itself yet another colossal failure of our foreign policy and intelligence ‘elites’ - adds only insult to our nation’s self-inflicted injuries.

Thousands of young American sons and (to our everlasting shame) daughters have been killed, horribly wounded, disabled and disfigured in Afghanistan. Trillions in treasure that could have been used to educate and uplift those same sons and daughters have been pissed away. Actually it's even worse, because those trillions were borrowed and this and future generations are now saddled with the debt.

So as we come to terms with this inevitable conclusion of our Afghanistan folly, let it be recorded that our Ivy-league educated ruling class failed to learn even this most-basic and obvious lesson of history. And let history judge the rest of us with scorn and contempt if we continue to allow ourselves to be led by these fools.

The author hosts Right Now with Jim Daws, where you can listen to an expanded versions of this and other topics.