Tuesday, the Washington Post ran an interesting story about the Biden White House and their concerns for what might await them should the new House GOP majority manage to stop begging for scraps from the table for long enough to do its job.

From the moment President Biden’s Afghanistan pullout began to go wrong — chaos at Kabul’s airport, 13 U.S. service members killed by a suicide bombing, Afghans falling to their deaths from departing planes — the White House braced for withering congressional inquiries.

But it never had to face one from an empowered opposition — until now. While much attention is focused on Republicans’ plans to investigate Biden’s son Hunter, some White House and other administration officials privately say an Afghanistan probe could prove more emotionally difficult and politically damaging.

The White House can — and plans to — dismiss any investigation into Hunter Biden as a conspiratorial witch hunt, but even Democrats concede that Congress has a right to scrutinize a troubled military action that resulted in American and Afghan deaths. Democrats may argue Hunter Biden’s business dealings aren’t of concern to ordinary Americans, but few would say the same of the Afghan pullout.

Personally, I rate this as doubtful. The decision to leave Afghanistan was made under President Trump; Biden actually delayed the withdrawal by some months, giving more prep time for the military. The people who carried out Biden’s withdrawal were the same people who would’ve carried out Trump’s. All an investigation will reveal is that kind of barking shambles the military has become under a chain of command more concerned about understanding “white rage” than the art of war. This last National Defense Authorization Act showed that in both houses of Congress, Republicans are still in awe of military officers and the military and will give them whatever they want. Without a real clean shot at Biden, I don’t see why the House would investigate Afghanistan, given so much other fertile ground to plow with this current bunch in the White House.

One thing I think Congress should investigate is something that happened this week.

Horrendous news for Afghan women and girls. The Taliban have announced the closure of universities for women in Afghanistan, according to a letter by the higher education minister. It is expected to take effect immediately pic.twitter.com/bVhXGXhYUg

— Yalda Hakim (@BBCYaldaHakim) December 20, 2022

Afghan women have been left devastated after the Taliban announced they’d no longer be allowed to attend university. It’s now 459 days since girls were banned from attending secondary school with the group reverting back to their hardline policies of the 90s pic.twitter.com/fUyQcfhj8s

— Yalda Hakim (@BBCYaldaHakim) December 21, 2022

Yep, even though the UN and other folks told us that they were confident that the Taliban would follow through on their promise to allow women to attend universities, now they have been expelled. Even though Blinken assured us that aid would be linked to the Taliban’s observance of human rights, despite banning women from primary and secondary education and carrying out summary executions, the aid continues to flow. In cash.

Afghanistan's Taliban displays pallets of cash received for 'humanitarian aid' https://t.co/OWvha2bby6

— Fox News (@FoxNews) December 13, 2022

I don’t think House Republicans should investigate the expulsion of women from universities. We were dealing with the Taliban, and if a handful of overeducated, under-intelligent knobs fooled themselves into thinking this wouldn’t happen, then it is more of an indictment of our foreign policy elite than of the Taliban. Depriving women of education is a stupid move in a nation that vitally needs human capital. If women aren’t allowed to work, if they have something of an education, they can teach their children to read and write. Having said that, the Taliban fought a successful 20-year war, with popular support, to preserve their way of life. At some point, we need to STFU about it and decide what to do next.

No matter what policies the BigBrainThinkrs® come up with, there is a role for a Congressional investigation. I think the House should investigate how we allowed a highly successful punitive expedition in the wake of 9/11 to morph into two decades of a failed attempt to change the Pashtun culture. How did we dump billions into training an Afghan Army that folded under the first hint of stress? Indeed, what were our goals, and what were the metrics to evaluate our progress in use after Osama bin Laden slipped out of Afghanistan in (probably) December 2001? What was a victory supposed to look like?

The nation needs answers to those questions. We need to know what the plan was for eradicating cultural norms that have existed for thousands of years in favor of one that is a few hundred years old that did not involve genocide. We need answers from all the people who thought “schools for girls” was a worthy cause to expend the lives of young men on how that was supposed to play out.

A disaster like Aghanistan is only useful if we learn what not to do again and the architects of the policy are named and held up to public shame.