French authorities said the stabbing inside the police station was an Islamic extremist attack.

Ninety-six-year-old Khan, who authored more than 200 books, died on Tuesday.

In 2015, in the Dallas suburb of Irving, the fates of two very different Texans collided.

One was 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed, a precocious kid in a NASA T-shirt who had built a clock out of spare parts and brought it to school in a pencil case. His English teacher decided it might be a bomb, and the school called the police, who arrested Mohamed for bringing in a “hoax bomb.” Because Mohamed’s family was part of Irving’s large Muslim minority, many liberals saw this as a baseless case of Islamophobia.

The other Texan was Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne, a blond 44-year-old with Disney-princess bone structure. She defended Mohamed’s arrest on Facebook, then went on The Glenn Beck Program to repeat the “hoax bomb” lie and complain that the child hadn’t given police enough information. “We’ve heard more from the media than the child ever released to the police when we were asking him questions,” she said calmly.

The controversy dragged obscure Irving into the national conversation. Yet another brown kid in a red state was being overpoliced. Yet another public official backed the police response. Within days, the news had reached the BlackBerry of President Barack Obama, who tweeted, “Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House?”

In the end, Mohamed was never charged, and he and his family moved to Qatar. As for Van Duyne: This past November, she was elected to the United States Congress.

Her victory was a surprise—at least to some. Last year, President Donald Trump’s popularity among Texans was flagging, and Democrats in the state, who hoped to take control of the Texas House and win several congressional seats, thought diverse suburbs such as Irving would be reluctant to elect Trumplike Republicans. Van Duyne’s district—where the Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke beat Republican Senator Ted Cruz in 2018 while losing statewide—looked like one of their best opportunities. Democrats enrolled Van Duyne’s opponent, Candace Valenzuela, in the “Red to Blue” program, which aims to help Democratic candidates win Republican districts.

But Republicans, including Van Duyne, won all the Texas seats Democrats had targeted, and the GOP maintained control of the state legislature. Van Duyne outperformed Trump, winning her district even as the then-president lost it to Joe Biden—one of the nine House Republicans to manage that feat. Democrats weren’t just beaten; they were beaten by the exact kind of candidate they thought voters were done with. The contest was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “most bitter loss,” as one Texas Republican strategist told Fox News.

The outcome complicates the narrative about Texas that liberals like to tell: that the state is slowly but surely “turning blue”; that one day soon Texans will wake up, come to their senses, and become Democrats. Van Duyne’s victory suggests that her 2015 strategy of stoking fears of foreigners didn’t make her unelectable in a diverse, growing suburb—and may have even aided her. Trump may be gone, but Trumpism is very much alive.

Van Duyne is in some ways a quintessential Texan, in that she’s not originally from there. She was born in upstate New York. Like droves of other northerners in recent decades, her family moved to the Dallas area when she was a teenager, for the warmer weather. (It’s a popular destination; my family also moved to a Dallas suburb when I was in middle school.)

She paid her own way through Cornell University, in New York, and returned to Texas to work in marketing and communications. Shiek Shah, a former co-worker and longtime friend, calls Van Duyne intelligent and soft-spoken, a devoted mom and a diligent worker. She’s a good listener, he told me, who is willing to change her mind. Eventually, Van Duyne ran a marketing firm with her husband. (They’re now divorced.)

Van Duyne’s spokesperson did not respond to interview or comment requests. Neither did Van Duyne’s ex-husband. But he did send me a newsletter published by her subdivision, Hackberry Creek, in which she tells a flattering story about how she got into politics. Van Duyne, who has a visually impaired daughter, wrote that she rallied the neighborhood to build a park so that her daughter and other kids would have a place to play. “Little did I know,” she wrote, “starting that effort would lead to people asking me to run for office.”

[ Read: Newtown’s congresswoman takes on Marjorie Taylor Greene ]

The less flattering origin story is this: Around 2002, Van Duyne and other homeowners in her subdivision organized to block a big new commercial development from coming to the area. Hackberry Creek is a “master-planned gated community” full of 3,000-square-foot houses with Jacuzzi tubs and plantation shutters, all set among “hillside vistas and winding creeks.” The residents were worried about trash and food odors drifting over from the proposed restaurants and stores, according to Herbert Gears, who was a city-council member at the time and favored the plan. Riled up by the dispute over the development with Gears, Van Duyne ran for city council in 2004 and won his seat. Beating an incumbent is rarely easy, but Van Duyne speaks with an unflappable Texas niceness, and had befriended everyone, including some of the most important Republicans in town. “She’s one of those types that people just like,” says Rick Barnes, the chair of the Republican Party of Tarrant County, which is partly represented by Van Duyne.

Irving’s city council is unusually contentious. At one point, a former city-council member called me to complain about Van Duyne, then asked for their name to be taken out of this article because they were worried the congresswoman would seek revenge. Barnes described Van Duyne as “strong-willed,” and throughout her career, she has cast herself as a tough mom who never backs down. In 2005, a year after losing his council seat to Van Duyne, Gears became mayor, and the two proceeded to fight bitterly and constantly. Van Duyne opposed building apartments in Irving because, as she wrote in a 2008 Dallas Morning News op-ed, “in addition to the greater susceptibility to crime and increased traffic created by the high density of people in an apartment complex, many Irving residents are averse to apartments because of their long-term effects on the community … Will the apartments beautify the area or lower its aesthetic value?”

In part, these were just the statements of a proud Irvingite convinced that there is nowhere better to be. “You get the people inside of Irving who don’t like it and complain about it,” she said in a 2015 speech. “But you go to New York, and they’re like, Oh you’re from Irving. Oh, that’s a great city. You’ve got DFW Airport, ExxonMobil …” But Van Duyne took her opposition to apartments a step further: She asked the city to hire a consultant to attack members of the Dallas city council who supported building apartments near Irving, according to Gears, who told the story to The Dallas Morning News years ago and repeated it to me recently.

In 2011, Van Duyne defeated Gears to become the first female mayor of the 200,000-person city. As mayor, she developed a knack for getting people to believe in her, according to fellow council member John Danish, but also for shutting down projects she didn’t agree with. She refused to sign city ordinances if she’d voted against them, according to a 2015 profile by Avi Selk, a Washington Post journalist who was then at The Dallas Morning News. Selk, who covered Irving for the Morning News, sums up this period of Van Duyne’s term as “ineffectual.” “She didn’t accomplish any of the stuff she wanted to do,” he told me.

A few years into her tenure, Van Duyne started to look beyond typical mayoral matters, such as cutting taxes by half a penny, and to the culture wars. Some Texas politicians were already flirting with Islamophobia: Republican Representative Louie Gohmert claimed in 2013 that “radical Islamists” were being “trained to act like Hispanic[s]” so they could sneak across the border. Trump had already spent years implying that President Obama was Muslim, and won widespread press coverage for it. “At that time, trashing on Muslims was very politically popular,” Gears told me.

One local Facebook group, in particular, tended to attract posters who were both pro–Van Duyne and anti-Islamic, Selk told me. “It was just wall-to-wall racism,” he said. Several members of the Facebook group “absolutely feared and hated Muslims.” Though Van Duyne did not participate in the racist conversations, she did pop up occasionally to check in with constituents. And the tenor of the discussion meant Islamophobia became a “good issue” for her, Selk said.

In 2015, Van Duyne seized on a claim, promoted by the conservative site Breitbart News, suggesting that a Muslim court in Irving was operating under Sharia law. She swiftly posted a condemnation of the idea on Facebook. “Recently, there have been rumors suggesting that the City of Irving has somehow condoned, approved or enacted the implementation of a Sharia Law Court in our City,” she wrote. “Let me be clear, neither the City of Irving, our elected officials or city staff have anything to do with the decision of the mosque that has been identified as starting a Sharia Court.”

The “Sharia Law Court” was in fact a mediation panel for resolving disputes among Muslims in Dallas. These types of mediators exist for Christians and Jews too, and the area’s Islamic community said its panel complied with American laws. The fact-checking site Politifact rated “false” the claim that Muslims “attempted to establish the first Islamic Sharia court inside the United States in the town of Irving, Texas.”

Nevertheless, Van Duyne went on Glenn Beck’s show to denounce the panel. “Equal treatment under the law doesn’t seem to exist,” Van Duyne told Beck. “I think you need to put your foot down and say, ‘This is America; we have laws here already.’ If you want to consult, if you want to arbitrate, that is well within our law … I’ve got no problem with it. But setting up a separate court—setting up separate law—is not anything.”

Beck cut her off. “This is an actual court?”

“Correct,” Van Duyne responded, inaccurately.

Afterward, Van Duyne pushed the Irving city council to pass a resolution endorsing a Texas House bill that would bar “foreign” laws from superseding American laws. The measure was widely known as an “anti-Sharia” bill, and it thrilled the state’s far-right Republicans. It might strain credulity that a big-city mayor with an Ivy League education would actually believe that Sharia law was about to take over the state of Texas. To some, Van Duyne’s Sharia scaremongering seemed more savvy than sincere. “I think it’s a policy position that she already held, but then she may have pushed it further, such as through a vote in the city council, due to political aspirations,” says Mark Jones, a political-science professor at Rice University.

Van Duyne framed her proposal as an issue of women’s rights. “When you have women whose testimony is equal to half that of a man’s, how can you defend that if that is happening in our country?” she asked at a 2017 forum. It’s hard to argue with that—which was, perhaps, exactly the point. The Dallas Observer has called Van Duyne “a Trumpist Republican before Trumpist Republicans existed.” And she did display a preternatural ability to play one of Trump’s favorite tunes: “Our nation cannot be so overly sensitive in defending other cultures that we stop protecting our own,” Van Duyne said at the forum.

The “clock boy” incident, as it has come to be known, happened just a few months later. Soon, armed anti-Muslim protesters descended on the Islamic Center of Irving, citing, in part, the “Sharia court” flap as their motivation. They published the names and addresses of Irving Muslims, terrifying the community. Mohamed’s family sued Van Duyne for defamation, though the lawsuit against her would ultimately be dismissed. Van Duyne, as usual, stayed the course. When asked about Obama’s tweet in support of Mohamed, she told Beck, “It seems to be an underlying habit that he is going to second-guess police officers without any kind of information.”

As mayor, Van Duyne had been visiting the Islamic Center, a massive white mosque with an emerald dome, once or twice a year. She would read for kids at the school there and attend Ramadan interfaith dinners, according to Raed Sbeit, a former board member of the mosque. Van Duyne’s friend Shah, who is of Indian descent, says that Van Duyne never expressed any xenophobic views toward him or around him. The incident with Mohamed, to him, was an example of a city leader displaying caution in an era of school shootings. Whatever the explanation, in 2015, Van Duyne stopped visiting the mosque. “Beth is not Beth when she first came to office,” Sbeit told me.

[Read: The left’s answer to Trump is 6 foot 8 and wears shorts in February]

That year, reporters went from writing stories about how Van Duyne was highlighting the “city’s ‘wins’” to writing stories about how she was “a hero for conservatives.” To get even more attention, she took another page out of the Trump playbook: Attack the media. When Selk was reporting his profile about Van Duyne for The Dallas Morning News, she deemed his questions about her home and work life inappropriate and refused to answer them. “She developed this Tea Party talking tour for months afterward, where she had a whole slide about me and my questions and lots of jokes about how I was probably romantically interested in her,” Selk told me. After the “Sharia court” incident, the Morning News columnist Steve Blow also wrote that Van Duyne had lied about him while on the Tea Party speaking circuit. “She was slamming the paper at every opportunity,” Selk said. “That was good politics too.”

Van Duyne went after the people her constituency already didn’t like—the media, Muslims—and it paid off with growing exposure, more media attention, and ultimately bigger jobs. In 2017, Trump appointed her as a regional administrator within the Department of Housing and Urban Development, responsible for overseeing issues such as disaster recovery and economic development across Texas and four other states.

Van Duyne wasn’t one of those reluctant career bureaucrats who held their nose as they did Trump’s bidding. She had been one of the few mayors of a large city to back his presidential campaign. After leaving HUD, she ran for Congress as a supporter of Trump’s policies, won his endorsement—and, last November, won the seat.

A newly elected member of Congress who prevailed in a close race in a swing district like Van Duyne’s might be expected to try to acquire a moderate reputation in D.C. Unlike many freshman members of Congress, though, Van Duyne knows she won’t be facing the same voters next year. Because Democrats failed to win control of the Texas House, Republicans will have unilateral control over drawing district lines in the state, and are nearly certain to make Van Duyne’s district even more Republican ahead of the 2022 election. Her Trumpy, conservative reputation means she probably won’t be vulnerable in the next GOP primary, and with a more Republican-leaning district, she’ll be even less likely to be defeated by a Democrat, says Jones, the political scientist.

She has acted accordingly, voting against certifying Pennsylvania’s election results, then criticizing President Biden for undoing Trump’s legacy. She’s even sparred with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter about who used to be the tougher waitress.

Van Duyne’s gender makes her especially valuable to the Texas congressional delegation. Texas Republicans have always had trouble recruiting female candidates, and she’s only the third Republican woman from Texas to be elected to the House—and one of only two serving now. “In Texas, it’s difficult for anybody to defeat a sitting U.S. House member,” Jones says. “And Van Duyne, as only one of two women Republicans, is likely to be especially protected, in the sense that the GOP realizes it has a serious image problem.”

I asked Barnes, the GOP chair, about the most common criticism of Van Duyne: that the way she made a name for herself, pretending to crack down on Sharia law, was not what a growing, diverse—and partly Muslim—area really wanted from its leader. “It may be that we are finding that it was more in line with what the citizens of the area wanted and desired out of their mayor … than may have become public at the time,” he said. Indeed, among Republicans in Texas, Trumpism’s appeal endures. Trump remains the most popular Republican politician in Texas among GOP voters—more popular than Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, Senator Ted Cruz, or Senator John Cornyn. Van Duyne is “just reflecting what the Republican base thinks about Donald Trump, and that is that they’re very supportive of him,” Jones says.

Ahead of last year’s election, Democrats had imagined that Trumpist candidates like Van Duyne would seem out of step with a changing Texas. But an ambitious single mother who has become a city-council member, a mayor, a regional housing administrator, and finally a U.S. representative is clearly not out of step. She is walking in precisely the right direction.

From April 12, Muslims observe the holy month of Ramadan.

They fast from sunrise to sunset—this includes drinks and other substances, such as tobacco and non-essential oral medicine. For almost 2 billion people around the world, this raises the question of whether they should postpone getting a Covid-19 vaccine injection during the daytime till after Eid, when the new moon will mark the end of Ramadan.

Most Islamic scholars have said that vaccine injections are permitted during fasting hours, and should not be avoided during the coming month.

Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.

Ken Mehlman wanted to apologize. Speaking with The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder in 2010, the former Republican National Committee chair came out as gay, and acknowledged that, despite being a party leader, he had not worked against the GOP’s strategy of setting up anti-marriage-equality referendums in key states prior to the 2004 election.

“Mehlman said at the time that he could not, as an individual Republican, go against the party consensus,” Ambinder wrote. He added that Mehlman “often wondered why gay voters never formed common cause with Republican opponents of Islamic jihad, which he called ‘the greatest anti-gay force in the world right now.’”

The interview represented a shift in conservative politics, as the Republican Party moved from demonizing one group of Americans to another. The time for blaming the nation’s problems on gay people was over; now was the time to come together as a country and blame our problems on Muslims. For the past 30 years, the GOP has pursued a consistent strategy: Find a misunderstood or marginalized group, convince voters that the members of that group pose an existential threat to society, and then ride to victory on the promise of using state power to crush them.

As president, George W. Bush had courted both Muslims and Latinos as part of his coalition, which somewhat restrained the right’s nativism. But that changed following Barack Obama’s election, after which the Republican Party embraced harsh anti-immigrant and conspiratorial anti-Muslim politics. Republicans today are focused on using the state to discriminate against trans people.

[Chase Strangio: The trans future I never dreamed of]

In 2004, gay people were the GOP’s target. Mehlman told Ambinder that Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove had “been working with Republicans to make sure that anti-gay initiatives and referenda would appear on November ballots in 2004 and 2006 to help Republicans.” Rove gloated to The New York Times in November 2004 that “moral values” had carried Bush to reelection. “People do not like the idea or the concept of marriage as being a union between a man and a woman being uprooted and overturned by a few activist judges or a couple of activist local officials,” he told the Times. Rove later denied that he’d had anything to do with that strategy.

In 2010, when Mehlman apologized, Obama was president. Same-sex marriage was not yet supported by most Americans—Obama himself did not support it at the time—but the trajectory was clear. From 2004 to 2010, support for marriage equality increased from 31 to 42 percent. The military’s ban on openly gay service members would be repealed that year. Although the Republican Party would continue to oppose marriage equality, it had become clear that the party had to find a new target, one with fewer political allies.

In fact, it already had. Mehlman’s remark to Ambinder about “Republican opponents of Islamic jihad” was a nod to the political climate of the 2010s. By that time, Republican legislators were embracing the anti-Muslim conspiracy that the imposition of Taliban-style Islamic law in America was imminent. This strategy was consonant with many Republicans’ embrace of the myth that Obama was a secret Muslim who had not been born in the United States and was therefore not eligible to be president—the same myth that first endeared Donald Trump to the Republican base. Although anti-Muslim fervor has hardly subsided, this political strategy peaked in 2011, when dozens of states introduced anti-Sharia laws.

Also during this period, Republicans pursued a series of draconian anti-immigration laws modeled after Arizona’s S.B. 1070, criticized by immigrant advocates as the “show me your papers” law, because it allowed police to stop anyone they suspected of being undocumented, effectively requiring noncitizens—or anyone who might be mistaken for one—to carry proof of status at all times. Such proposals were a clear license for racial profiling. As with the anti-Sharia legislation, Republican elected officials across the country fell all over one another in an effort to display their animosity toward immigrants by passing or proposing similar legislation. The Supreme Court struck down much of the Arizona bill in 2012 on the grounds that it conflicted with federal law, which takes precedence on issues of immigration.

At the time, the Obama administration was cracking down on illegal immigration in an attempt to bring Republicans to the table for a grand bargain on comprehensive immigration reform—but it was more effective politics for both Democrats and Republicans to pretend that Obama was less of a border hawk than he really was.

Again and again, Republicans have targeted groups they believe too small or too powerless to spark a costly political backlash. By attacking them, the GOP seeks to place Democrats in a political bind. If they decline to bow to demagoguery, Democrats risk looking either too culturally avant-garde for the comfort of more conservative voters—whose support they need to remain viable—or too preoccupied with defending the rights of a beleaguered minority to pay attention to bread-and-butter issues that matter to the majority. This strategy has worked in the past—President Bill Clinton, who signed the federal statute outlawing same-sex marriage in 1996, was no Republican. Many people across the political spectrum accept the premise that defending a marginalized group’s civil rights is “identity politics,” while choosing to strip away those rights is not.

In 2004, Republicans pursued a good-cop/bad-cop strategy: Bush sounded notes of tolerance and acceptance in public, while Republican strategists pursued an anti-gay-rights agenda behind the scenes. In 2012, the party’s presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, ran to the right of Bush on both immigration and LGBTQ issues in order to prove that he was “severely conservative.” In 2016, the Republican base wanted a nominee who would sound their hatreds with a foghorn rather than a dog whistle. Trump obliged, promising to ban Muslims from coming to the United States and build a wall on the border with Mexico. Trump had previously mocked Romney’s harsh “self-deportation” policy as “maniacal,” but the reality-show star knew what the Republican base wanted in a president when he finally ran.

That brings us to 2021. Republicans lost the fight over marriage equality so decisively that some now pretend not to have vigorously opposed it in the first place—much to the alarm of many religious conservatives, who are their most dedicated supporters. The fight over immigration is locked in a stalemate, because Trump showed national Republicans that embracing nativism is less politically costly than they had supposed. Anti-Muslim animus has hardly disappeared, but it is no longer as useful a tool to oppose the current leader of the Democratic Party, an elderly Irish Catholic man.

[Read: The GOP’s Islamophobia problem]

Conflicts between civil rights and religious freedom can certainly present thorny legal dilemmas, but most of what I’m describing here involves Republicans consciously choosing not to leave people alone. There was no threat to life or liberty that demanded same-sex-marriage bans, Sharia bans, or draconian state-level immigration laws. They embraced these causes because they believed that picking on these particular groups of people was good politics, because of their supporters’ animus toward them, and because they believed that their targets lacked the votes or political allies to properly fight back.

And so Republicans have conjured a new existential threat, targeting trans people, a tiny segment of the population that is nevertheless the subject of full-blown panic. Earlier forays into anti-trans politics resulted in a backlash, with North Carolina’s infamous 2016 “bathroom bill” being repealed. But Republicans have since redoubled their efforts, with a particular emphasis on “protecting” children, a familiar echo of their opposition to the civil rights of gay Americans.

Republican legislators in Arkansas just passed a ban on gender-affirming medical care for trans youth, overriding the governor’s veto, and Alabama is on the verge of passing a similar ban. Republican legislators in North Carolina have proposed legislation that would go further, forcing state employees to immediately notify parents in writing if a child displays “gender nonconformity,” forcing public workers to act as gender cops. A Texas proposal would label gender-affirming care a form of child abuse and separate trans children from parents who helped them secure it. More such proposals are sure to follow, as Republicans indulge the moral panic about trans identity, hoping to reap the benefits of once again forcing Democrats to defend the civil rights of a small community that lacks the numbers to outvote them.

These laws are egregious violations of personal liberty, inserting the state into decisions best made by families in consultation with medical professionals. That many of the people involved in passing such laws are among those who fought marriage equality is no coincidence. Perhaps they believe that, in picking a fight with children, they’ve chosen a war they can actually win.

In important aspects of foreign and national-security policy, the Biden administration is really the Trump administration but with civilized manners. In no respect is that more true than in the president’s announcement of a complete military withdrawal from Afghanistan by September 11 of this year, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that brought the United States to that country’s stark mountains, fruitful valleys, and dusty towns.

There is little point in debating whether the move is correct: There is no abstract ideal of a policy, only that which can be successfully executed by those charged with so doing at a given moment. The Afghan War has lacked high-level American commitment for years now. If there is any surprise, it is that for eight years of Barack Obama and four years of Donald Trump, the United States persisted in a conflict that most senior officials in those administrations regarded with pessimism and distaste.

This cannot be a moment for final judgment about America’s Afghan war—we are simply too close to make measured assessments. But we can make preliminary, if uncomfortable, judgments, and embark on morally and strategically prudent policies.

[George Packer: A debt of honor]

This is not the end of the war; it is merely the end of its direct American phase. The war began more than four decades ago, with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and its first American phase, in the 1980s, featured indirect United States intervention on behalf of the anti-Soviet mujahideen. The war will assuredly last well beyond the American exit. There will be no power-sharing, no reconciliation, no peace of the brave.

The war will grind on, with the edge going to the brutal fundamentalist warriors of the Taliban, who will torture and slaughter even as they repeal the advances made in women’s education and secularism in any form. But they will not have it all their own way. Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, India, and the Central Asian republics have their own stakes in this war, and not all of them want to see an outright Taliban victory. So they will fund clients and proxies, as will, in all likelihood, the United States. And the people of Afghanistan will continue to suffer.

The American temptation to declare victory and walk away helped enable the rise of the Taliban after Soviet forces evacuated Afghanistan; the temptation to declare defeat and do the same may have similar consequences. Afghanistan will remain the cockpit of Great Power rivalries, as well as the home to a toxic and unrepentant Islamic fundamentalism that previously sheltered al-Qaeda, a movement that is not dead, and that may even gain some energy from this outcome.

The United States will be able to pick sides in the conflict, a luxury it does not now have. For decades it has been subject to implicit and explicit Pakistani threats to choke the supply lines running to American forces in Afghanistan. Once the withdrawal eliminates Pakistan’s hold on its logistics, the United States can and should more freely support India’s efforts to protect its own interests in Afghanistan. The United States can similarly play off the Russians against the Chinese, who do not necessarily want the same things there.

But strategic freedom will come at the cost of strategic reputation. It is not possible simply to walk away from a war one has been committed to and pay no penalty, even if the penalty is less than the cost of continuing to fight. It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that the Great Power that knows Afghanistan best from its own experience, Russia, is now testing Western resolve by mobilizing forces on the Ukrainian frontier. The price of an Afghan exit, in other words, may be the need to show military determination in other hot spots in Eastern Europe or the Far East.

The Afghan exit will also come with a moral cost, which honesty should compel Americans to acknowledge and act upon. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans, if not more—from interpreters and helicopter pilots, schoolteachers and bureaucrats—have thrown in their lot with us. Americans owe them something. It takes a moderate amount of resolve to pull out of Afghanistan; it will take more to belatedly welcome Afghan refugees to the United States, as we did with Vietnamese refugees. And the Vietnamese example suggests that the people fleeing Afghanistan will be as hardworking, patriotic, and productive a group of citizens as any other Americans, foreign or native-born.

Opening American doors is a matter of this moment. Passing historical judgment on the meaning of America’s Afghan war is something best deferred for a decade. The temptation will be to blame it all on an ur-mistake, be it going to Afghanistan to begin with (a move that few opposed) or showing a fatal lack of will (was there evidence of anything but regression on the battlefields in recent years?).

[Read: The forgotten people fighting the forever war]

Despite the old saw, it is not victory but rather defeat that has many fathers. The initial light-footprint invasion that allowed Osama bin Laden to escape, a poorly conceived and externally imposed constitutional order, a failure to invest human and material resources in developing Afghan military forces, a reluctance to recognize erosion in security, a “surge” that could only reduce American endurance in a long-haul war, repeated signaling to Afghan partners that we were willing to abandon them—the list of mistakes is long and instructive. It bears study.

But Americans should remember that they were often not the most important actors on the scene. The Pakistani and other secret services, the Europeans, the Russians, and, yes, the Afghans themselves made their decisions and did consequential things. There were abler and weaker leaders, contingent events, and good decisions badly executed as well as bad ones vigorously put into effect. Sorting these out is the proper job of historians, not the contemporaries who will most assuredly get it wrong because of preconceived notions, partisan bias, or desire for vindication of previously held positions. Above all, Americans will never know what the consequences would have been of not acting—although the Syrian civil war, with all its ripples through the Middle East, may be a suggestive example to consider.

This is, then, a humbling moment for the United States. It is a moment of relief for the parents of servicemen and servicewomen who would otherwise deploy to a war in which their politicians do not believe. It should be a moment of reflection for the leaders of institutions that performed less well than they ought to have. It is a moment for diplomats to rebalance and reconfigure elements of American foreign policy. And it is most definitely a moment of moral responsibility. If Americans take that responsibility seriously, welcoming to freedom and citizenship those who put their faith in American words, American commitments, and American ideals, then something redeeming will be saved from the wreck of a decent cause.