But Democrats have only themselves to blame for pro-Trump Republicans’ efforts to argue it was.
But Democrats have only themselves to blame for pro-Trump Republicans’ efforts to argue it was.
T here’s much to condemn in President Biden’s disgraceful orchestration and dishonest defense of the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan. But it is meritless to berate the president over a phone conversation he had with the former president of the then-U.S.-backed (and now-deposed) Afghan government.
Criticism of Biden’s July 23 call with then-president Ashraf Ghani is mounting among Republicans, particularly those who remain beholden to former president Trump. Here is the convoluted theory: Trump was impeached over a phone conversation with the leader of Ukraine, in which he conflated legitimate investigative concerns with his own political fortunes; analogously, Biden’s call with Ghani may also trigger a finding of “high crimes and misdemeanors” because he is said to have been leveraging his foreign-relations powers to prevent a major hit to his domestic political standing.
It is a frivolous contention, although a predictable one — and one for which Democrats can thank themselves.
Trump should not have been impeached over his discussion with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and, more broadly, his squeezing of Zelensky by threatening to withhold congressionally allocated military aid. The impeachment was a blatantly partisan exercise, exactly the kind of congressional abuse of the impeachment power about which the Framers worried.
Though they strained mightily, Democrats could not find a penal crime that fit Trump’s conduct. Impeachment does not require a penal crime, but cases are markedly weaker without one. In a straight partisan vote, the Democrat-controlled House settled on “abuse of power.” Yet all presidents abuse their powers at some point — as Biden unabashedly did, for instance, in extending the CDC’s lawless eviction moratorium. Trump’s abuse of power was not of the impeachable variety, especially given that Ukraine did not investigate the Bidens as Trump asked and got its aid anyway.
Many of us who opposed Trump’s impeachment warned at the time that Democrats would come to regret the precedent for partisan abuse of impeachment that, in their anti-Trump zeal, they had set. It may not take long.
Biden’s call with his Afghan opposite number is really not comparable to Trump’s with Zelensky.
The Biden–Ghani conversation occurred as what turned out to be the Taliban’s final offensive had intensified. Biden’s appalling decision-making had much to do with that: His announcing a full withdrawal by September 11 (later accelerated to August 31) regardless of conditions on the ground; his triggering the early evacuation of technical advisers whom the Afghan armed forces (as designed by the U.S.) needed to conduct air operations on which the functioning of their ground troops depended; and his decision to pull out of Bagram Air Base in the dark of night without alerting the Afghan commanders. Like Trump’s indefensible 2020 withdrawal agreement with the Taliban — which cut out the Afghan government and addressed the Taliban as the “emirate” they planned to establish under sharia law — Biden’s actions, coupled with the Afghan government’s well-earned reputation for corruption, promoted the perception that the Taliban’s victory was inevitable.
Biden is dense. He did not actually want the Taliban to take over Afghanistan even though his stewardship virtually assured that outcome. Moreover, consistent with long-standing, bullheaded bipartisan resistance to studying and factoring in our enemies’ sharia-supremacist ideology, the president delusionally hoped for an Afghan political settlement in which the Taliban would be content with a seat at the democratic table. That was never going to happen since, if not defeated, the Taliban were determined to be reinstalled as rulers of an authoritarian emirate. But even Biden understood that the Taliban would have no incentive to negotiate unless the perception that they were driving to victory was undermined, and quickly.
Hence, in the days prior to Biden’s speaking with Ghani, the U.S. carried out air strikes to support Afghan ground combat against the Taliban. (Lest you think jihadists lack a sense of humor, the Taliban complained that these strikes violated their agreement with Trump.) Despite the ongoing U.S. force reduction and imminent withdrawal, Biden said that he was willing to continue close air support on the condition that Ghani show a concrete plan to turn the tide. With that as background, Reuters reports:
In much of the call, Biden focused on what he called the Afghan government’s “perception” problem. “I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban,” Biden said. “And there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.”
Biden told Ghani that if Afghanistan’s prominent political figures were to give a press conference together, backing a new military strategy, “that will change perception, and that will change an awful lot I think.”
Attributing to Biden’s comments the worst conceivable motives (as the Democrats habitually did to Trump’s comments and actions), the president’s critics accuse him of trying to project a fraudulent image of what was happening in Afghanistan (“whether it is true or not”) in order to improve his own political standing in the U.S. and change the “perception” that the rout was on — a perception that was increasing derision of Biden’s withdrawal policy.
This is a distorted rendition of the call. In the notorious fog of war, perception and deception can be decisive. What was emboldening the Taliban was the seeming inevitability of their victory, which had a snowball effect: They stepped up operations across the country, and the Afghan forces — increasingly deprived of U.S. support, particularly air support — melted away, inexorably resulting in more operations and more melting away.
It is not as if Biden was fraudulently inflating the value of an exchange-traded stock. He was the United States commander in chief, making decisions about a war whose outcome the U.S. had a vested interest in. If the Afghan government did not create the perception that the Taliban could be pushed back, then the Afghan armed forces and the government itself were going to collapse. As it turned out, they did collapse, and even more rapidly than Biden and Ghani had feared they would.
Biden was right in this narrow regard: Even if it was true that the fight against the Taliban was not going well, Ghani’s failure to alter perceptions would result in a fatal loss of support that the Afghan government needed, both from other countries and from Afghan provinces, where people were being put to a choice of fighting or resigning themselves to the Taliban.
Was Biden mindful of how the growing Afghan debacle would affect his political standing? Of course he was. All presidents are mindful of the implications their foreign-policy decisions hold for their domestic political fortunes. But that doesn’t mean we should presume their actions are corrupt. Most of the time, a president’s concerns about political consequences lead to better national-security policy. The theory of self-determination in a democratic republic is that the people we elect will make better decisions because they know they must answer to us.
Biden — it frightens me to observe — still has nearly three and a half years before his term ends. He is not anywhere near facing the voters again, and there is no reason to think he was encouraging Ghani to commit a fraud in order to influence a U.S. election.
By contrast, Trump was asking a foreign government to help him dig up political dirt on his (then-likely) opponent in the 2020 election campaign. It was an ambiguous situation in that there were, in fact, grounds to investigate Biden-family corruption, including in Ukraine. But it still remains the case that one of the highest responsibilities of the federal government is to protect Americans from overreach and abuse by foreign regimes.
If Trump’s campaign wanted to investigate Biden, it could have legitimately done so. If his Justice Department had had colorable grounds to investigate Biden, that would have been dicier, though still defensible as long as the grounds were serious enough. But it was indefensible for an American president to pressure a foreign government to investigate an American — let alone a political rival — under circumstances in which the Justice Department was not seeking that foreign government’s assistance in a good-faith American investigation.
Even stipulating all that, Trump should not have been impeached for his call with Zelensky, though it was worthy of congressional inquiry and whatever political damage that would have entailed. Impeachment is our Constitution’s nuclear option, and it should be reserved for egregious misconduct. In the Trump–Ukraine kerfuffle, ultimately, the Bidens were not investigated and Ukraine’s defense was not damaged — indeed, Trump gave the Ukrainians lethal defense aid that President Obama had denied them.
Biden’s phone call with Ghani was appropriate, but his Afghanistan policy has been disastrous. Trump’s phone call was inappropriate in part, but his Ukraine policy was fine — arguably an improvement over his predecessor’s. Neither case involved misconduct warranting impeachment and removal.
I am open to the possibility that a president’s willful abandonment of Americans to an evil jihadist regime could be an impeachable offense. But even though I find his policy reckless, his decision-making reprehensible, and his efforts to dodge accountability indecorous, Biden’s prioritizing of withdrawal over the vital U.S. counterterrorism mission — heedless of the windfall our enemies would reap in armaments and fodder for propaganda — does not amount to “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Nevertheless, we are probably going to have a highly partisan discussion of “impeachment over a phone call” in the near future. It will be led by pro-Trump Republicans, and they will be following the Democrats’ script.