Biden should stop passing the buck on the Afghanistan debacle
Because of JFK’s willingness to take ownership of a debacle, his public standing went up, not down. “The worse I do, the more popular I get,” he marveled.
That is a lesson President Biden should take to heart in how to handle the continuing fallout of the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, which seared into our collective memory horrifying images of desperate Afghans clinging to the landing gear of U.S. aircraft in a desperate bid to escape Taliban tyranny. Even as more than 20 million Afghans stand on the brink of starvation, he continues to engage in unseemly buck-passing that only hurts his popularity and undermines his credibility.
Biden’s most complete statement on Afghanistan was an Aug. 31 speech in which he accepted “responsibility” for the decision yet insisted, incredibly enough, that the evacuation was an “extraordinary success.” He focused on the 120,000 people evacuated from Kabul, even though, by some estimates, 90 percent of the interpreters and other Afghans holding special immigrant visas were left behind.
Biden blamed Afghan troops for not holding on “as long as anyone expected” after they had been abandoned by their U.S. allies, but he claimed, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the administration was “ready” when Kabul fell. “The bottom line,” he said, “is there is no evacuation from the end of a war that you can run without the kinds of complexities, challenges, and threats we faced.”
Politico aptly headlined its story on the speech “Biden tries to shift blame on Afghanistan.” The president’s unwillingness to grapple with his own failures contributed, I believe, to the precipitous decline in his popularity that began in August and has continued to the present day.
Also continuing to the present day is Biden’s blame-shifting on Afghanistan. Last week, in an interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt, he refused to accept the accounts of U.S. military commanders who said that the administration failed to prepare for the rapid rise of the Taliban and the resulting need to evacuate so many people. “No,” Biden said. “No, that’s not what I was told.” Asked whether he was rejecting the commanders’ testimony, he said, “Yes, I am. I am rejecting them.”
Biden can reject what the officers said, but their accounts — released to my Post colleagues Dan Lamothe and Alex Horton under a Freedom of Information Act request — have the ring of truth, and it is insulting to the military to pretend otherwise. Navy Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, the top U.S. commander on the ground during the August evacuation, told Army investigators that the military would have been “much better prepared to conduct a more orderly” evacuation “if policymakers had paid attention to the indicators of what was happening on the ground.” Marine Brig. Gen. Farrell J. Sullivan, who commanded the Marines at the airport, said, “In my opinion, the NSC [National Security Council] was not seriously planning for an evacuation,” and that until early August it was “like pulling teeth” to get the U.S. Embassy to discuss the subject.
Their accounts comport with the findings of George Packer, whose Atlantic article “The Betrayal” offers the fullest and most depressing chronicle of the shambolic exit from Afghanistan. Refugee advocates begged the administration to begin airlifting vulnerable Afghans to Guam for asylum processing in early 2021, when the United States still controlled air bases all over the country. White House officials responded, according to Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), “We’re on it. Don’t worry. We know what we’re doing.” But they weren’t on it, and they didn’t know what they were doing.
Packer paints a devastating picture of a White House more concerned with “optics” — it would look bad, officials feared, to begin a large-scale evacuation — than about saving Afghans who had risked their lives to help U.S. forces. “This sluggishness in the face of impending calamity,” Packer writes, “continued the same self-deception, prevarication, and groupthink — the same inability to grasp the hard truths of Afghanistan — that had plagued the entire 20-year war.”
It is easy to blame staffers for this debacle, but the buck stops with the president. While showing empathy for fellow Americans, Biden has consistently displayed indifference to the fate of Afghans. (Some argue that Biden again displayed his indifference when he decided to give the families of 9/11 victims half of the $7 billion in frozen Afghan central bank funds, rather than using the entire amount to relieve that country’s humanitarian disaster.) In early 2020, when Biden was asked whether would bear some responsibility for the loss of rights that Afghan women would suffer after a U.S. pullout, he responded, “Do I bear responsibility? Zero responsibility.”
I suspect Biden’s approval ratings might improve if he would rethink his Trump-like attempt to dodge responsibility for the biggest fiasco on his watch — so far.
