For years, the Americans in Doha had negotiated with the Taliban about a democratic division of power.
At the weekend, their list of demands was reduced to one request: Let us evacuate our embassy before you finally take over Afghanistan.
In this country, the authorities wanted to check which of the Afghans, the German soldiers, diplomats or aid organizations had stood by since 2002, could have earned admission in Germany.
But there will soon be no more due process.
Even the plan to rescue its own people from Kabul with the air force only has a chance of success thanks to America's robust evacuation mission.
Afghanistan, for which the Bundeswehr campaigned for almost two decades, has capitulated.
The federal government is now rushed to issue tickets for what may be the last flights from under the rule of the militant Islamists.
Thousands of partners are likely to be left to their fate: the Taliban.
Are Germans only responsible for their interpreters?
However, the intervention powers would not have been able to free themselves from the moral dilemma if the government troops had bought them those months up to the fall of Kabul through a more courageous struggle, which were still calculated in the West last week. It's about much more than just the date from which "local workers" from earlier years can hope to move. The question is: for whom do America, Germany and allies have responsibility after two decades in Afghanistan? Only for the interpreters of your soldiers? Or also for the teachers at internationally funded girls' schools?
Of course, the answer could never be to bring to Europe and America all Afghans who have campaigned for a modern country.
Such an exodus would be another blow to society.
It was up to the Afghans to make Afghanistan a country that could stand on its own two feet.
But this is a generational project that was just beginning in the twentieth year after the invasion of the Hindu Kush.
Europeans behind America's broad back
Even in the hour of failure, European politicians can hide behind America's back and point their fingers at Joe Biden.
Last week, the American president spoke to his allies from the heart when he called on the Afghans to finally fight for themselves.
But everyone knew that it was wishful thinking.
They had given the Afghan army countless hours of training and plenty of equipment, but they had never been able to fill the crucial gap: the soldiers lacked the morale to fight, the belief in the project of a free Afghanistan. When in doubt, they withdrew from the experience they had painfully acquired in their families about how to come to terms with new rulers.
The West was faced with a fatal dilemma: the longer its troops stayed, the longer the Afghan government rested on it. When they pulled away, the structure collapsed. That was foreseeable. The West has become hopelessly overdone in Afghanistan. This admission is long overdue, but not a license to escape from responsibility. America and Europe have to acknowledge that the last manageable troop presence was enough to perpetuate the stalemate with the Taliban. It wasn't a strategy. But everything else is failure.