The recriminations will last months, if not years. In fact, think of the blame game to come as a Mexican standoff between the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and U.S. intelligence.

Except instead of pointing guns, they’re pointing fingers.

This detail from Reuters is stunning even by the standards of the past week, though. I repeat a question I asked over the weekend: Did we ever know what was going on in Afghanistan on the ground?

In 20 years, did we ever have a clue?

A person familiar with the situation said the Biden administration was behind the curve as things deteriorated in Afghanistan. “Every decision has come too late and in reaction to events that make the subsequent decision obsolete,” the source said.

Local embassy employees who have been at home for weeks were left to make their own way to the airport, the source said, adding that emails were sent to them on Sunday after sporadic gunfire to remain in their houses or some other safe location…

The source and another U.S. official told Reuters that the administration so badly misjudged the situation that the State Department flew a regular rotation of diplomats into Kabul last Tuesday even as the Taliban advanced toward the capital.

Five sources told the news outlet that the military had asked for a bigger role weeks ago to evacuate Afghans but were denied as the administration clung to its fantasies that the Afghan army might hold. “We could have done a lot more to help. The administration waited too long,” said one military official. The chaos extends all the way from Kabul to Washington, as members of Congress field calls from desperate Afghans and their relatives here in the U.S. to do something, anything, to try to get them out. “This is exactly the scenario we feared. This is what we warned against,” GOP Rep. Peter Meijer, who’s lobbied for months to start evacuations, told the Daily Beast.

Who’s to blame for the intelligence failure? Someone is, and someone should pay. “President Biden’s team failed him across the board,” said Democratic strategist Chris Kofinis to NBC. “Not only should his national security adviser and his secretary of state be fired immediately, but anyone who let this national disgrace happen should be fired. … Biden either makes immediate changes or he may not have much of a presidency left after this.” Politico has a fun piece about culpability being sprayed in every direction, from the usual suspects in the intel bureaus to Congress for not streamlining the special visa process for Afghans to the National Security Council for not coordinating the withdrawal better to the White House for dragging its feet due to, uh, the problematic optics of a massive refugee influx.

Is that really why they’re leaving Afghans to die? Because they’re worried about Tucker Carlson hyperventilating on his show about the “Great Replacement”? “It’s like they want the credit from liberals for ending the Trump cruelty to immigrants and refugees but they also don’t want the political backlash that comes from actual refugees arriving in America in any sort of large numbers,” said one official to Politico.

The lowest example of blame-shifting I’ve seen in the past 72 hours is Biden himself attempting to blame American-allied Afghans for not clamoring to evacuate, supposedly because they were committed to their country and thought it might endure. “In my 10-plus years plus advocating on this issue, I have yet to encounter an Afghan interpreter who wants to remain in his country,” said the head of one nonprofit to the Daily Beast. “It is just too dangerous. In fact, it was dangerous with the troops there. Since interpreters were the face of the coalition, they have been a priority target of insurgents from the get-go. The White House’s argument does not make any sense.” Imagine leaving these people behind enemy lines to die and explaining it away by suggesting, eh, maybe they didn’t want to leave anyway.

Biden officials are also blaming Trump and his team, of course. They grumbled to Axios today that there was no evacuation plan for Americans and Afghans waiting on the shelf for them when they moved into the White House in January, which is no excuse for a team that had six months to prepare and advertised itself as “the adults” returning to Washington. Still, it’s not surprising given the competence of the Trump administration that they would have negotiated a May 1 deadline for withdrawal but never set to work on the logistics of making that happen. And as much as Biden’s team bears the blame for the “Dunkirk” scenario playing out at the airport right now, Andy McCarthy’s right that Trump’s “peace agreement” with the Taliban was embarrassing and contributed to the current mess:

To be sure, senior Trump advisers who knew better would have continued pushing against Trump’s recklessness, and perhaps they’d have continued to hold him off, at least for a time. But the conditions in the Trump–Taliban agreement were shams, not benchmarks. They were being rampantly violated even as the agreement was negotiated and signed, and Trump officials knew it — including when they forced the regime in Kabul to release the prisoners…

Behind the scenes, of course, publicly stoic senior officials were pleading with Trump not to pull out. But the president was undermining this effort at every turn — repeatedly telling the world he could not get out of the “forever war” fast enough, while his advisers tried to insist that the exit would be conditional on Taliban compliance. In fact, in April, Trump publicly derided Biden for extending the May 1 deadline his agreement had set for full evacuation — because leaving Afghanistan would be “a wonderful and positive thing to do” despite the deteriorating security situation and, critically, the lack of credible U.S. counterterrorism capabilities.

Trump’s agreement with the Taliban was never anything more than a fig leaf. He was determined to get out, heedless of whether our government had in place a plausible counterterrorism apparatus to prevent the Taliban from giving safe harbor to al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other anti-American jihadist groups.

Would he have done a better job evacuating people than Biden’s team did? He couldn’t have done worse. But there’s no reason to think he would have done much better considering that he’s impetuous and might have given the order to leave on a whim; that the caliber of his cabinet officials declined steadily over time as confirmed appointees were replaced with acting officials; and that he obviously didn’t care about the fate of the Afghans themselves per his abandonment of the Kurds in Syria. Given his antipathy to refugees generally, it’s anyone’s guess how many Afghans he would have allowed into the United States. History “will hold President Biden to account as it should,” writes McCarthy, “but it will not forget that President Trump was an enthusiastic accomplice — no matter how hard he and his allies strain to distance themselves from the unfolding calamity.” At least there won’t be any Camp David summits with the Taliban going forward.