Biden Took Ownership of the Disastrous Afghanistan Withdrawal Months Ago

‘I stand squarely behind my decision,” President Biden told his fellow Americans from the White House yesterday. And that, he went on to explain, is why none of what you’re seeing on television is my fault.

By “my decision,” what Biden really seemed to mean was “Donald Trump’s decision.” “When I came into office,” Biden volunteered, “I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Under his agreement, U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, just a little over three months after I took office.” The implication: that that absolute rotter Donald Trump did all this, while I, Good Ol’ Joey Biden, was just unlucky enough to be in the hot seat when it happened.

Trouble is: U.S. forces weren’t actually “out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021,” were they? Instead, they were out in August 2021 — which, along with President Biden’s loudly hailed reversals of other Trump initiatives — suggests that Biden had a lot more control over the details than he is now willing to admit. As, indeed, do Biden’s own words. “After consulting closely with our allies and partners, with our military leaders and intelligence personnel, with our diplomats and our development experts, with the Congress and the vice president, as well as with Ashraf Ghani and many others around the world,” Biden said back in April, “I concluded that it’s time to end America’s longest war. It’s time for American troops to come home.” That’s a lot of conversations to have in pursuit of a policy that was already decided.

In July, Biden was equally emphatic that the plan — and the timetable — were his. “When I announced our drawdown in April,” he told the press, “I said we would be out by September, and we’re on track to meet that target.” In the same speech, said, “I made the decision to end the war. . . . I made the decision to end the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan. . . . I made the decision with clear eyes.” “The last administration,” Biden noted, “made an agreement with the Taliban to remove all our forces by May 1 of this past — of this year.” But, he said, “I want to be clear: The U.S. military mission in Afghanistan continues through the end of August.”

During his address yesterday afternoon, the president assiduously ignored all of this. “I’m left again to ask of those who argue that we should stay,” he inquired: “How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghan troops will not? How many more lives, American lives, is it worth?” This, of course, entirely fails to respond to the criticism at hand, for it is over the details of the departure, rather than the departure per se, that Biden is being lambasted. “After 20 years,” Biden sighed, “I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces.” Perhaps. But there is a good way to withdraw U.S. forces, and it does not involve grounding the Air Force in the middle of an active fight; removing key military assets before 5,000 to 10,000 American citizens and a boatload of American hardware had been extracted; leaving sensitive information lying around; waiting until the last minute to take care of the 20,000-plus Afghan interpreters and helpers you promised to bring to the U.S.; stranding diplomats and other staff; and losing control of a detention facility housing thousands of the prisoners whom the United States has spent two decades rounding up. Nor, quite obviously, does it involve sending 6,000 troops in order to manage the bungled extraction of the remaining 2,500 troops. “Some of the Afghans,” Biden said preposterously, “did not want to leave earlier.” The desperate footage from the Kabul airport seems to suggest otherwise.

At times, President Biden seemed to be arguing that what we’ve seen on our screens over the past few days were the inevitable wages of withdrawal. “If anything,” he contended, “the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.” But this line of argument makes sense only if “the developments of the past week” had lined up with Biden’s predictions — which they most definitely did not. In July, Biden insisted that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was “not inevitable” and, indeed, that a unified Afghan government run by the group was “highly unlikely.” The Taliban, he suggested, was “not even close in terms of their capacity” to the Afghanistan National Security Forces and the federal police. And no, he assured a reporter who asked whether he saw “any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam,” they certainly weren’t equivalent to “the North Vietnamese army.” “There’s going to be no circumstance,” Biden told the press, “where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan.”

Well . . .

It is telling that, even now, Biden remains unable to tell a consistent story about his approach. The United States was in Afghanistan, the president said yesterday, to “get those who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001, and make sure al-Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again.” As a result, he concluded, “our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland.” And yet, just a few minutes later, he reversed himself on this completely, proposing that “human rights must be the center of our foreign policy, not the periphery.” He vowed that the United States will “continue to support the Afghan people,” will “lead with our diplomacy, our international influence, and our humanitarian aid,” will “continue to push for regional diplomacy and engagement to prevent violence and instability,” and will “continue to speak out for the basic rights of the Afghan people, of women and girls, just as we speak out all over the world” — with military force “if necessary.” Perhaps most disjointedly of all, Biden boasted that “we never gave up the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and we got him.” We? We? Joe Biden is famous for having opposed that operation. Does he expect us to have forgotten that?

Judging by the speed with which he contradicted himself yesterday, one rather suspects that he does. Just five seconds separated Biden’s stone-faced insistence that “we planned for every contingency” and his pained admission that “the truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated,” and those were taken up by a furrowed reiteration of the promise that, as president, Joe Biden will always “be straight with you” — which, funnily enough, was precisely the one thing he failed to be throughout the entire sordid affair.

PHOTOS: The Fall of Afghanistan