Last week the bipartisan Afghanistan War Commission held its first public hearing since it was established in 2021, with members of the foreign policy great-and-good offering testimony on the origins of the conflict and why re-examining it is important. It is a solemn and noble exercise, founded on George Santayana’s famous aphorism that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If we review the West’s 20-year deployment in Afghanistan, the logic goes, we will understand what we did wrong and we will not make the same mistakes in the future.

The commission was created by Congress with two purposes: first, to examine, in detail, with the calming distance of time, exactly what happened; secondly, more importantly, “​​to develop a series of lessons learned and recommendations for the way forward that will inform future decisions by Congress and policymakers throughout the United States Government.” It comprises 16 commissioners, eight appointed by the Democratic Party and eight by Republicans, and its co-chairs are Shamila N. Chaudary, a foreign policy academic who worked in the State Department and the National Security Council under President Barack Obama; and Colin Jackson, a Department of Defense official under President Donald Trump who served in Afghanistan.

This process of historical analysis and learning is scheduled to take four years. To put that in perspective, a newly commissioned........

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