WASHINGTON Having underpromised and overdelivered his way to a solid start to his presidency, President Joe Biden inexplicably flipped the script on his Afghanistan withdrawal to disastrous effect.

The departure from Afghanistan would be done deliberately, he promised , not at all like the humiliating exit from Saigon a half-century earlier in Vietnam, and U.S. troops would stay until every American citizen who wanted out had been flown to safety.

In the end, none of those assurances was fulfilled. Even worse, the chaotic exit left 13 American service members and some 200 Afghans dead from a terrorist bombing precisely the dire consequence Biden was determined to avoid by getting out of the country quickly.

They raised expectations and then didnt do the nuts-and-bolts planning. They were hoping for the best and didnt prepare for these worst-case scenarios, said Brian Katulis, an alumnus of former President Bill Clintons National Security Council and now a fellow at the Center for American Progress. And they ended up with the worst case.

From his COVID-19 vaccine drive to his stimulus plan to bipartisan progress on his infrastructure proposal, Biden had set modest goals and earned both strong job approval ratings and the air of competence. Much of that success has been undone, new polling shows , as Americans, while still supporting his objective of leaving Afghanistan, are unhappy with how he managed it.

And advocates for the tens of thousands of Afghans who helped the United States efforts there over the past two decades are beside themselves with anger and frustration. The majority of those Afghan allies and their families a pool of some 88,000 earlier this year remain in Afghanistan, with the new Taliban rulers searching them out and killing them.

This is chaos of their own creation, said Matt Zeller, an Afghanistan veteran and co-founder of the group No One Left Behind that works to extract Afghan interpreters and others who helped the U.S. war effort.

Exactly why Biden chose the Afghanistan withdrawal a task over which outside actors like the former government of Ashraf Ghani, the Taliban and rival terror groups like ISIS-K had enormous influence to make such sweeping promises is unclear. One major factor is that the administration truly believed it had considerably more time to stage an orderly exit than it did, based on what turned out to be a wildly optimistic assessment regarding the stability and strength of Ghanis government.

Biden himself laid that out in his remarks on Tuesday when he explicitly blamed Ghani for much of the tumult. The people of Afghanistan watched their own government collapse and the president flee amid the corruption and malfeasance, handing over the country to their enemy, the Taliban, and significantly increasing the risk to U.S. personnel and our allies, he said.

To the Afghan advocates most of whom generally support Biden, particularly compared to his predecessor Donald Trump and his anti-refugee policies the idea that the U.S.-backed government could hang on after the U.S. departure when it had been steadily losing territory to the Taliban for years, and especially after Trumps February 2020 peace agreement with the Taliban, was magical thinking.

They should have challenged that assumption. They should have been asking: What if, in the end, it all goes to hell? said Mark Jacobson, an Afghanistan war veteran who runs Syracuse Universitys Maxwell School programs in Washington. I think the collapse was quite possibly inevitable as soon as Trump signed his surrender.