In less than a month the U.S. will mark the 20th anniversary of the disastrous Sept. 11 attack by al-Qaida on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington D.C. We went to war in Afghanistan to drive out the terrorists based there and oust the Taliban government that harbored them. 20 years.

The cost has been high: according to U.S. News & World Report, 2,448 American service members were killed in Afghanistan through April, along with 3,846 U.S. contractors; 66,000 Afghan national military and police and 47,245 Afghan civilians. We have spent $2 trillion on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and will be paying the debt on those wars for decades to come.

And today, we are back where we started. The Taliban bided its time over the past 20 years and swept through the country in a matter of weeks after President Joe Biden announced he would withdraw U.S. troops by Sept. 11, 2021. We have to believe al-Qaida, or some similar terror group, will not be far behind, setting up training camps and planning a new attack on the U.S. and other Western targets.

President Biden said Monday he stood behind his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan rather than commit troops to another decade in Afghanistan. He is correct that nobody from either party wanted that, but neither do they want the threat of more terrorist attacks aimed at the U.S.