The word “terror” has taken on a specific meaning over the last couple of decades, and it has come at the cost of some of its more traditional usages. Most of us first experience terror when our parents leave us alone in the dark. Terror is familiar when a large bug lands on our neck or we narrowly avoid a car wreck. It’s usually a brief feeling, and if it extends over time it becomes something closer to dread. Sometimes we’re just scared. Maybe we want to report our neighbors for excessive noise or mistreating their children, but we’re worried that they might become violent. These are all disagreeable feelings, and we’ll do a lot to avoid them.

If we want to understand why we succeeded in chasing the Russians out of Afghanistan only to be chased out ourselves 30 years later, we have to understand the use of fear in all its forms. The Taliban just conquered Afghanistan in days, barely having to use any violence at all, simply because it was presumed by nearly everybody that they would eventually win and bring a terrible retribution down on anyone who had resisted. Better to give up quickly than to fight in vain. This is also how Ghenghis Khan conquered a lot of territory once he had made it clear that he would take no prisoners.

So, if you want an explanation for why the central government in Afghanistan failed, it’s because they were not feared. They certainly had the weaponry to inspire fear. Even with a bloated enrollment list, they had the numbers to inspire fear. But they weren’t trained or designed to bring terrible vengeance down on anyone who looked at them sideways. They were supposed to be defending a civil society based on ethnic pluralism and human rights. If they had been trained instead to come in the middle of the night and snatch anyone who’d been friendly with the Taliban, they would have had a decent chance of keeping the tribal elders in line.

But that kind of military force isn’t consistent with America’s purported values. We couldn’t hold an international coalition together for that kind of mission. Instead, we thought building them an Air Force would give them a useful advantage. But an Air Force is useless when the goal is to make people terrified of a visit in the night.

Simply by occupying Afghanistan for two decades, we succeeded in building up a modern, secularized society in some of the more urbanized parts of the country, but this didn’t make the beneficiaries more willing to fight. It had the exact opposite effect. They got used to relative security and checking social media on their smart phones precisely because someone else was taking responsibility for keeping the night terrors at bay. They weren’t prepared to put down their phones and pick up a rifle, and the tribal leaders who are responsible for their safety knew that the government would not provide safety once the Americans were gone.

It’s true that corruption played an important part in the failure of our mission, but the real problem was in the concept. A highly ethical and efficient government might have maintained a stronger army and more loyalty but it would never match the Taliban for producing fear unless producing fear was central to its purpose.

This isn’t an argument for doing nation building differently and better, but for avoiding the attempt in the first place. The way the government in Kabul collapsed in instructive. Tribal elders simply decided that the government was less of a problem than the Taliban. They told their sons to lay down their arms in city after city in return for assurances from the Taliban that they wouldn’t be harmed. Quite obviously, the goal all along should have been to give the tribal leaders reason to reach the opposite conclusion.

But, again, building a force more fearsome than the Taliban was not what we wanted to do. We somehow thought we could provide the security for normalcy to grow and then people would value normalcy enough to fight for it. Instead, it made people dependent and complacent. I see this in America all the time when I hear my liberal friends say that they’re going to leave the country because they don’t like how conservatives are running the place. Afghanistan shows where that type of thinking can lead.

To President Biden’s credit, he didn’t see how our mission in Afghanistan could ever succeed or any point in continuing to make sacrifices to push the day of reckoning off. Things went south more quickly than he anticipated and it’s messy, but he was always going to pay a big political price for allowing the reckoning to come. That takes courage. Biden has big balls, and a lot of his critics are fools and opportunists.

I am terribly sad for Afghanistan, and I share a feeling of national humiliation in seeing how this all turned out, but I admire Biden for seeing things clearly and having the backbone to stand up and risk everything to put an end to this error. Our more urgent threat is here at home, and too many aren’t willing to fight.