There is no way to sugarcoat the bewildering and abysmal departure of the United States from Afghanistan.

Last week, the Taliban entered the capital of the nation — Kabul — effectively ending a more than 20-year war that killed 2,400 Americans and mauled thousands more. The speed of the collapse of Afghanistan’s military against the Taliban was extraordinary and rests solely on the policymakers of the United States.

Back home, the big headlines are COVID-19 and whatever partisan political fight is going on, but voters everywhere should at least take notice that the effort they funded — to the tune of $83 billion — just went down the toilet.

Polls over the past few years showed Americans, as a rule, don’t care about Afghanistan. Who can blame them? It is a far-off place with difficult sounding names for its cities and the memory that the deadly 9/11 terrorist attacks were spawned in that nation has faded. Now, Afghanistan is just another developing nation everyone wants to forget.

But history won’t be so kind. History won’t let everyone forget. History has a habit of coming back to haunt nations and lawmakers who decide — for whatever reason — to abandon ambitious foreign policy ventures.

Never let anyone fool you. We had a chance to win in Afghanistan. Not last year, nor in the past five or six years. But once there was a window, narrow for sure, to get things right.

We failed. Miserably.

You, the reader, and taxpayer, spent more than $80 billon to repair and prop up a nation. Your money was supposed to build a robust Afghani military to protect the nation, to ensure it was never again a haven for terrorists. That money — your money — was for nothing.

There will be plenty of excuses, for sure, but in the end, the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan only marginally better than it did Vietnam. That should give everyone pause.

Finally, the most poignant piece of our departure is the sacrifice made by so many brave men and women of our armed forces in Afghanistan. They were deployed to that nation and performed admirably. They did everything that was asked of them. Their legacy deserved better than a hurried retreat and the abandonment of a nation.

President Joe Biden will, unfairly or fairly, take a large share of the blame for the last chapter in our longest war and he should.

Our strategy in Afghanistan failed. Now we, and future generations, will have to live with the results.