Thursday's bloody bombings at Kabul's airport and a nearby hotel are just the latest painful blows in a war that's lasted nearly 20 years for the U.S. and NATO allies and over 40 for Afghans. An affiliate of the Islamic State, the nihilist terrorist organization that keeps coming back in a revised guise, has claimed responsibility for the deadly blasts.

The attacks will make the chaotic, incomplete withdrawal of U.S. citizens and forces, as well as allied Afghans, even more difficult. As of Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken estimated that about 1,500 Americans remained in Afghanistan. The number of Afghans who qualify for evacuation is exponentially higher — at least 250,000, according to an analysis from the New York Times based on Department of Defense data.

Not to be forgotten — although they may justifiably feel overlooked — are foreign nationals of NATO nations that came to America's defense when the U.S. became the first and only member country to trigger the pact's Article 5 collective defense mechanism after the 9/11 attacks. And each of these countries rightly fear that Afghan interpreters and others who helped their war efforts are endangered by Taliban rule, too.

So the requests from lawmakers and allies alike that Biden extend his arbitrary Aug. 31 withdrawal deadline have been reasonable. But the president, himself a former Foreign Relations Committee chair in the U.S. Senate and a traditional transatlanticist set to reinvigorate alliances, may have heard but did not heed this consensus call. Instead, whereas former President Donald Trump once labeled NATO "obsolete," Biden made allies mere observers by not consulting on the method of the drawdown, which began during Trump's tenure.

The threat of even deadlier terrorist incidents if the U.S. crosses the Taliban's declared "red line" of the withdrawal deadline might make these calls moot. But it shouldn't mute the scrutiny of the Biden administration's planning — or lack thereof — for any contingency, including a government collapse and commensurate Taliban takeover in just days.

Beyond such questioning of the execution of the withdrawal, the withdrawal decision itself deserves renewed scrutiny. While the war was not popular with and generally forgotten by Americans, it did provide a scaffolding for a status quo that reduced the threat of terrorist organizations again basing themselves in Afghanistan, and for protecting many who had bought into the premise of democracy — if not Jeffersonian, at least not the theocratic terror of Taliban rule.

Further, the entire war needs to be independently and intensively examined by wise women and men who put country, not party, first. By any standard America and its allies lost this war. Additionally, the threat of transnational terrorism — the original justification for the 2001 invasion — is still strong, as evidenced by Thursday's attacks. And the terrorists who harbored al-Qaida and the Taliban are back in command, calling the shots on America's retreat.

The impact of a generation of mistakes on individual Americans, allies and Afghans is incalculable. So too is the effect on the U.S. global leadership at a time of retreating democracy and rising autocracy. Reckoning with such a profound defeat should not be left to partisanship but to statesmanship.

"Task number one is getting Americans, our Special Immigration Visa vulnerable Afghan partners and their families out," Bradley Bowman, senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told an editorial writer during a media briefing as news of the bombings was being reported. "Any failure to do that would really be a dereliction of duty of the president and would represent a strategic and moral failing we will all come to regret. Once that's done, I think it's important to conduct some serious self-reflection as a country, certainly on Capitol Hill, on this administration and the previous administration, to figure out how we arrived as such a horrible, shameful and dangerous outcome."

The self-reflection should reject the toxic politics defining and debasing our democracy.

"The threats we confront are too serious," said Bowman, a former Army officer, West Point assistant professor and Afghan war veteran. "The damage we've self-inflicted on ourselves and Afghans is too grave, the global consequences are too serious, for comments focusing on the next election."