Biden’s Afghanistan Speech Was a Dishonest, Incoherent, Contradictory Mess

A s it turns out, Joe Biden’s rambling speech defending his botched Afghanistan withdrawal seems even more incoherent and contradictory when you read the transcript.

The president informed us that the withdrawal was handled more efficiently and gloriously than any in history, but also that the chaos surrounding it was the fault of the Afghan army and Donald Trump:

The assumption was that more than 300,000 Afghan national security forces that we had trained over the past two decades and equipped would be a strong adversary in their civil wars with the Taliban. That assumption, that the Afghan government would be able to hold on for a period of time beyond military drawdown, turned out not to be accurate. . . .

My predecessor, the former president, signed an agreement with the Taliban to remove U.S. troops by May 1, just months after I was inaugurated. It included no requirement that Taliban work out a cooperative governing arrangement with the Afghan government. But it did authorize the release of 5,000 prisoners last year, including some of the Taliban’s top war commanders, among those who just took control of Afghanistan.

Fair enough, and our own Andrew McCarthy has written critically about that Trump-era deal. But contradictions abound in Biden’s remarks. The president of the United States, a man privy to the world’s best intelligence, was surprised by the fall of Afghanistan, and yet he saw no problem blaming Americans on the ground for not anticipating that collapse:

Since March, we reached out 19 times to Americans in Afghanistan, with multiple warnings and offers to help them leave Afghanistan, all the way back as far as March. After we started the evacuation 17 days ago, we did initial outreach and analysis and identified around 5,000 Americans who had decided earlier to stay in Afghanistan but now wanted to leave.

In July, Biden told us that the fall of Kabul was “highly unlikely” — even though, as the New York Times reported, the president was warned otherwise. Yet, that same month, the president reportedly called Afghan president Ashraf Ghani and pressured him to create the “perception” the Taliban weren’t winning. If Biden wanted people to believe 300,000 Afghan nationals were going “to hold out for a long time,” why should he expect the Americans and allies he stranded in Afghanistan to have known that those forces would fall in eleven days?

Biden said “5,000” Americans “who had decided earlier to stay in Afghanistan but now wanted to leave” got out — he also said “5,500” (the administration says “6,000”; this number fluctuates because it is almost surely made up). Biden then claimed that 90 percent — the administration says 98 percent — got out. “Now,” Biden said, “we believe that about 100 to 200 Americans remain in Afghanistan with some intention to leave.” Whichever of these numbers you use, the math is way off. And whether it is 500 or 100–200 or 50, how is it okay to leave their fate to the Taliban? As John McCormack points out, this is like Jimmy Carter making the case that “0.000023% of Americans were held hostage in Iran.”

Biden also spent a lot of time praising himself for bravely pulling out of Afghanistan, something no other president had the moral fortitude to do, but then also blamed Donald Trump for forcing his hand on the matter:

The fact is everything had changed. My predecessor had made a deal with the Taliban. When I came into office, we faced a deadline, May 1. The Taliban onslaught was coming. We faced one of two choices: follow the agreement of the previous administration and extend it to have more time for people to get out, or send in thousands more troops and escalate the war.

Aside from the contradiction — was it his choice or Trump’s? — this is a lie. One of the guarantees the Taliban made in the Doha deal, as S. Paul Kapur points out in the Wall Street Journal, was to participate in an “intra-Afghan dialogue,” to build a “permanent and comprehensive ceasefire,” and to agree on a “political roadmap” for Afghanistan’s future. They did none of these things. Biden could have set his own timelines in response. Instead, he offers false choices about renewing the war or getting everyone out.

Biden defended the valor and competence of American forces — which no person questioned in the first place — bragging about the unparalleled success of the airlift in the face of Monday-morning quarterbacking:

Now, some say we should have started mass evacuations sooner and “Couldn’t this have been done in a more orderly manner?”

If by “some,” the president is referring to Joe Biden, then he is, indeed, correct. Biden said the withdrawal would be “safe” and “orderly” earlier this year. He never warned that the pullout would be ugly and bloody. Anyone who expected a competent withdrawal was merely holding the president to his word.

Then, near the end of his speech — which oscillated between contrived whispery empathy and contrived righteous anger — Biden posed this idiotic theoretical:

I respectfully suggest you ask yourself this question: If we had been attacked on September 11, 2001, from Yemen instead of Afghanistan, would we have ever gone to war in Afghanistan?

Dude, ask yourself this, if the Swiss had attacked Pearl Harbor, would we have gone to war with Japan? Afghanistan harbored al-Qaeda and bin Laden. We went in to avenge 9/11 and root them out. We can debate the subsequent nation-building experiment — which Biden vociferously advocated for when it was politically expedient — but that has nothing to do with the president’s abandoning of Americans and unnecessarily putting troops in harm’s way. His weak excuses for the incompetent way this was undertaken don’t even make sense.