The mission is daunting. The 16-member bipartisan panel has been tasked by Congress with determining what went wrong and what American leaders can do differently the next time the United States goes to war. Their mandate includes the policies and actions of four presidential administrations, the U.S. military, the State Department, U.S. allies, and many other agencies, organizations, and people.

The Commission has 18 months to conduct its investigation and until August 2026 to produce a public final report.

The US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 ended the war, but delivered the country back into the hands of the Taliban, an enemy that Washington spent trillions of dollars defeating, starting after 9/11. The bloody and chaotic exit resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. troops and dozens of Afghans; left thousands of American allies with uncertain fates; provoked broad, bipartisan outrage; and prompted bitterly politicized congressional investigations and hearings.

The Republican-led House Foreign Affairs Committee is expected to release a final report next month detailing the findings of its investigation into the withdrawal, which included hours of heated and sometimes emotional testimony from Biden administration officials, military commanders, veterans and their families. The committee plans to interview Biden’s president, Jen Psaki, next week White House spokesman at the time of the withdrawal.

The war commission’s 4½-hour discussion Friday, held at the Veterans of Foreign Wars headquarters in Washington, featured former ambassadors, military officers and CIA personnel. It drew a small crowd of observers, many of whom also had ties to the war.

Chaudhary and her co-chair, Colin F. Jackson, a former Defense Department official, are aware of the charged atmosphere surrounding their undertaking. The commission itself was born out of the collective outrage that followed the withdrawal three years ago.

But they stressed that they are seeking a dialogue that is thoughtful and apolitical, even as committee members are hand-picked by Republican and Democratic lawmakers in the heat of national anxiety. “We are bipartisan in our makeup, but our work is nonpartisan,” Chaudhary said.

The question of culpability is hard to ignore, they admit. It “comes up again and again in our conversations,” Chaudhary told the panelists. People want to know whether the commission will name names and names of shame; whether it will deliver some measure of justice by identifying the leaders who made the worst critical decisions in the war.

The Commission will try not to do that, while at the same time trying to “create a “We owe it to the generation that served in Afghanistan, and the generation that will serve elsewhere.”

It is not just an assessment of the consequences of the war. failures. The commissioners The report will contain guidelines, they said: practical advice that can be applied to other wars in which the United States is involved, such as those in the Middle East and Ukraine, or to wars that have yet to happen but will happen someday.

If the first hearing can serve as a guide to the conclusions the commissioners are likely to draw, it is that so many different things have gone wrong.

Successive administrations failed to address the critical role that Pakistan — an ostensible U.S. ally — played in supporting and protecting the Taliban, said Nader Nadery, a witness who served as a senior Afghan government official. U.S. leaders also often prioritized short-term military goals over long-term values, and sometimes used rhetoric that undermined the Afghan government’s credibility, he said.

There were complicated chains of command throughout the war; disturbing personality clashes between American decision-makers and agencies; and commanding officers served so briefly that they represented “the institutional equivalent of a frontal lobotomy,” said another witness, Ronald Neumann, a former ambassador to Afghanistan and the author of “The Other War: Winning and Losing in Afghanistan” — published on 11 years before the US withdrawal.

There was a terribly designed system for parliamentary elections that invited fraud, said Noah Coburn, a political anthropologist who testified Friday. There was too much public interference in Afghan politics by American leaders, and too little policy input from Afghans. Poor American decisions on security partners, development and investment fueled corruption, which spread distrust of the government and support for the anti-government Taliban, Coburn said. So did civilian casualties, violent warlords and poor security.

It is not that no one said this during the war. Much has been written about it. Experts and documentation of events on the ground were plentiful when they happened, commissioners and panelists acknowledged. But often American officials failed to absorb the information, and successive administrations failed to use that knowledge to change course.

Jackson, the co-chair, said: “A fair question is, what decisions are you going to look at?”

“The simple answer is that we are going to be considering a much larger number of decisions than we can cover in detail, and there will be a very difficult selection process,” he said.

One of the obvious focuses, Jackson said, will be the decision to invade Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The commissioners will examine the decision to increase U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan in 2009. They will look at the decision-making that led to negotiations with the Taliban. And of course, they will look at decisions regarding withdrawal.

The commissioners acknowledged that their mandate has become enormous — perhaps so ambitious as to be nearly impossible for cynics. What began as a mission to understand and educate is also partly an exercise in collective therapy, the commissioners said, an opportunity not just for government civil servants, but for the larger population, and in particular veterans, to process what happened.

“For many of us, the war is still in our minds. We carry the moral, physical and emotional wounds in our daily lives,” Chaudhary said. “Closure may not be possible for everyone.” But there needs to be a space for “civil discourse,” she added.