The Fall of Afghanistan

Joe Biden has accomplished one thing that none of his predecessors did not. He has united the American commentariat. They have become as one in their singular condemnation of Biden's inept, bungling, near-criminal Afghanistan policy failure.

Surely, in a nation where our media mavens tend to politicize everything, it is noteworthy that so many of them are of one mind concerning Joe Biden.

The Daily Mail has collected a few representative comments from the mainstream media, and also from some of our Congressional representatives.

I recommend the linked article to your attention because it contains screen captures of the front pages of major American newspapers.

Entitling its collection:

'The burden of shame falls on President Joe Biden'

It continues with:

Wall Street Journal opinion piece by The Editorial Board

'President Biden's statement on Saturday washing his hands of Afghanistan deserves to go down as one of the most shameful in history by a Commander in Chief at such a moment of American retreat.'

CNN analysis by Stephen Collinson pronounces Biden’s policy a failure, a stain on his legacy:

'The debacle of the US defeat and chaotic retreat in Afghanistan is a political disaster for Joe Biden, whose failure to orchestrate an urgent and orderly exit will further rock a presidency plagued by crises and stain his legacy.' 

Writing in The Atlantic George Packer declares Biden’s betrayal to be a day that will live in infamy:

'The Biden administration failed to heed the warnings on Afghanistan, failed to act with urgency—and its failure has left tens of thousands of Afghans to a terrible fate. This betrayal will live in infamy. The burden of shame falls on President Joe Biden.'

New York Post editorial addressed Biden’s claim that he had inherited the problem and that the blame should be placed with Donald Trump. We have addressed this claim before, but today we note, with many other, that that Biden was happy to reverse any one of a number of Trump policies, especially those that involved illegal immigration.

'President Biden says he 'inherited' President Trump's withdrawal plans, but that is a lie. He could have taken more time, tried to at least secure the capital, and left a small peacekeeping force. Instead, we pulled out in the dead of night, so quickly we had to send troops back just to make sure our embassy was safely evacuated. It's as humiliating an end as the rooftop scramble in Saigon in 1975.'

David E. Sanger wrote this in the New York Times.

'Mr Biden will go down in history, fairly or unfairly, as the president who presided over a long-brewing, humiliating final act in the American experiment in Afghanistan.'

Max Boot, columnist for the Washington Post, a leading NeverTrump conservative holds Biden accountable:

'Strengthened by the copious U.S. weaponry they have captured — and by the prestige that comes with having humbled a superpower — the Taliban will now be more dangerous than ever. This is on Biden, and it will leave an indelible stain on his presidency.'

Paul Brandus, opinion columnist in USA Today tries to look beyond today’s chaos toward what really matters-- the next election? Huh?

'Biden is in charge now, this catastrophe is appearing on his watch, and he will have to take his lumps. That's the way it goes. Life, and politics, are often unfair. Yet as bad as things look for Biden today, I wonder just how much long-term damage this will actually do to him.'

Kyle Smith in the New York Post compares Biden’s policies to the Carter administration’s loss of Iran and its weakness in the face of the ayatollah’s hostage taking:

'The utterly nauseating and unnecessary abandonment of Afghanistan to its fate recalls a similar humiliation at the hands of Islamist radicals in the Jimmy Carter administration. President Biden's profligate spending policies are unleashing inflation that is sparking voter distrust so noticeable that even NPR is sounding the alarm.'

Former politician Trey Gowdy had this to say on Fox News:

'We're just weeks away from the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on our country. Three thousand lives were taken that day. Thousands of lives taken that day and thousands of lives have been lost since in defense of our nation. Tens of thousands of our sons and daughters have been injured. And more than a trillion dollars of your money has been spent in Afghanistan alone. And we are left to wonder why.'

Combat veteran, Senator Joni Ernst had this to say on Fox News:

'The rushed and haphazard withdrawal of US forces in Afghanistan is not the 'strategic shift' President Biden sold to the American people. Instead, it's a total abandonment of a country and its people – and a gift to the Taliban.' 

The Daily Mail does not report the Financial Times’ editorial commentary, so here it is. The FT does not think that there will be much of a repercussion politically, because Americans are largely tired of wars. Most likely, this is wishful thinking. One suspects that the American people are not so completely numb that they find abject surrender and humiliation to be all in a day’s work. Surely, the press coverage does not suggest as much. No major media outlets and no serious commentators are trying to spin the story-- because there is no way to make Biden look good here:

It was former president Donald Trump who announced US troops would leave by 2021 provided the Taliban met the terms of a peace accord signed last year. But going ahead with the pullout was Biden’s choice. The domestic political cost is still likely to be low. Polls show Americans are as weary today of the “forever wars” as they were under Trump. Preserving the messy military stalemate into which Afghanistan had settled was a hard political sell. In terms of America’s global standing, however, the miscalculation will haunt the rest of the Biden presidency.

Since Biden has been saying that there were no viable alternatives to his policy, the FT offers a few. In that it has hardly been alone:

Biden might still have been able to argue for much reduced US forces — which since 2015 had also suffered much reduced casualties — to remain as a backstop to the Afghan military, just as the US retained a long-term presence in Germany and South Korea. Instead, either the White House went ahead with the pullout regardless of intelligence warnings of what would follow, or the speed of the offensive was indeed unforeseen — a startling lack of insight in a country where America has had a ground presence for two decades.

In other words, it was a gigantic intelligence failure. Unless, of course, Biden and his policy making team simply ignored the intelligence:

Yet the Afghan collapse reflects not just a military and intelligence failure but the failure in 20 years to have built a more functional state. The initial goal of the post-9/11 intervention was to prevent al-Qaeda from using the country as a base for further attacks. Though President George W Bush invoked the Marshall Plan when pledging to reconstruct Afghanistan in 2002, and the US has now spent a trillion dollars on its campaign, it was never prepared to commit sufficient resources for the kind of nation-building it undertook after the second world war. It did devote time and money to training and equipping the military. But Afghan forces’ strategy to contain the Taliban depended on US backing.

As the FT foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman astutely pointed out, see my post of two days ago, the Biden administration has sent a signal that it is not committed to defending its supposed allies. The message will be heard in Beijing and also in the Middle East:

But the abandonment of Afghanistan raises doubts over the depth of US commitment to supposed allies, and its determination to see military entanglements through to the bitter end. As one of the north Atlantic alliance’s biggest and most costly foreign policy priorities of this century implodes, those lessons will not be lost on Beijing.