The UK and the rest of the west must remain committed to helping the people of Afghanistan

No welcoming ceremonies. No members of the royal family, still less the government, ready to see them return. Only a lone senior civil servant from the Foreign Office was there at Brize Norton to welcome back the ambassador, Sir Laurie Bristow, and the last of the UK troops from Afghanistan. After one of the longest wars in British military history, marked by so much bravery and drama, it was a low-key, muted event.

Rightly so. It feels very much like defeat. Despite the deserved praise for service personnel, aid agency staff and other civilian workers, and all their hard work, sacrifice and solid achievements, that legacy stands in great jeopardy, as is obvious.

As Afghanistan continues to fracture, the task of protecting its people becomes near-impossible – and thus all the more reason for the west to remain committed to providing help. But even if some understandings over foreign aid and facilities for aid agencies and western companies could be reached with the Taliban in Kabul, making those a reality on the ground in the remote regions is another matter.

The answer is that the west will need to work to protect the Afghan people, who have had to suffer through much violence and will likely see more. The Americans, in particular, will also have to work with and through the various regional powers on a humanitarian level to achieve those same ends – Russia, China, Pakistan, India, even Iran. To merely state that proposition is to acknowledge the scale of the challenge, as those governments have not previously displayed much passionate concern for the welfare of the Afghan people.

Full-scale military action is obviously out of the question – although the US has said it carried out an airstrike on Sunday, targeting a suspected Isis-K member in a vehicle, who was aiming to carry out an attack at Kabul airport. More “over the horizon” action like this is expected.

The prize for understatement in all the recent commentary must go to Lord Dannatt, the former head of the armed forces, who remarked: “It’s a big moment because it’s the end of a military chapter – a chapter that’s ended not in the way we would have wished.”

Indeed it has, and it’s incumbent on the west – and primarily on Joe Biden – to ensure the next chapter is not as dispiriting as the last. The buck still stops on his desk.