As the family and friends of the U.S. service members in Afghanistan look forward to embracing their loved ones again, President Joe Biden is bracing for the political fallout of his botched withdrawal.
Even Democrats want congressional investigations into the Biden administration’s Afghanistan intelligence and planning failures, with Republicans betting politics will not stop at the water’s edge before 2022. But there is a long wait until next November.
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Biden will wait 24 hours after Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, announces the final military plane has flown out of capital Kabul early Aug. 31 local time to commemorate the end of the two-decades-long Afghanistan War.
Officials will now rely on diplomatic channels to evacuate the hundreds of Americans who are still in Afghanistan and the tens of thousands of Afghan allies at risk of Taliban reprisals, according to McKenzie. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was the highest-ranking U.S. official to speak on Monday after White House press secretary Jen Psaki briefed reporters in the afternoon. Biden’s speech has been scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, not in prime time.
While McKenzie was candid in his disappointment that “we did not get everybody out who we wanted to get out,” Psaki touted the 123,000 people the United States extricated from Afghanistan. And she opened her briefing with the administration’s response to downgraded Tropical Storm Ida.
“The president stands by his decision to bring our men and women home from Afghanistan,” Psaki said.
McKenzie’s Afghanistan remarks conclude one chapter of U.S. foreign policy while opening a new one for Biden, with his credibility damaged domestically and abroad.
Congressional inquiries, supported by Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Susan Wild, will probe Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal, including last week’s terrorist attack outside Kabul’s airport that killed 13 American troops and almost 200 Afghans. It will also investigate the U.S. counterattacks on the Islamic State of Khorasan insurgents, which reportedly claimed the lives of 10 civilians.
They will also likely examine the Afghan refugee resettlement process and the people abandoned in-country.
Political communications expert Martha Joynt Kumar dismissed early complaints about the White House’s Afghanistan withdrawal messaging. Instead, she focused on Biden’s underlying strategy.
“The important point in this situation is why didn’t they have an accurate reading of what was happening in Afghanistan?” the Towson University emeritus professor asked.
Foreign policy has swayed elections before, particularly when the U.S. has been in the “middle of war or serious crisis,” according to historian David Greenberg. The Rutgers University journalism professor named Vietnam in 1968, Iran in 1980, and the war on terrorism in 2004 as examples.
But 12 months remain before the 2022 campaigns begin in earnest, Greenberg told the Washington Examiner. That period of time may shield Biden and congressional Democrats from the brunt of voter rage over the president’s mishandling of the Afghanistan withdrawal.
“The default position is for people to care mainly about kitchen-table issues and their economic situation,” Greenberg said. “We’re far away from an election right now.”
Republicans defied history in 2002 by gaining congressional seats in the post-Sept. 11 terrorist attacks midterm election cycle when George W. Bush was president, according to Brian Rosenwald, another historian. Bush was also reelected in 2004.
“You can quibble with whether the issue was national security versus foreign policy, but that’s somewhat of a semantical difference,” the University of Pennsylvania scholar said. “It also happened during World War II, when the sense that war was coming helped get Franklin Roosevelt elected to a third term and the desire not to change course during wartime got him elected to a fourth term.”
Rosenwald also cited Woodrow Wilson in 1916, Barry Goldwater in 1964, and Lyndon Johnson in 1968 as other former commanders in chief or presidential candidates defined by their foreign policies.
And in terms of midterm elections, Republicans weakened House Democrats’ majority in 1962 after the Cuban missile crisis, according to Rosenwald. But the GOP did not seize control of the House or Senate, even after John Kennedy’s bungled Bay of Pigs invasion and Vienna summit with then-Soviet Union Premier Nikita Khrushchev.
The Afghanistan withdrawal has dented Biden’s reputation for competence and compassion, Rosenwald contended. But he was skeptical that voters would punish the president for it. The electorate is likely to be more concerned by “COVID-19 and the economic reverberations of the pandemic, as well as whether Biden’s economic agenda passes and whether people feel any positive or negative impact from it,” he said.
Hurricane Ida’s destruction is an instance of how quickly the news cycle can evolve, regardless of last week’s blast and bloodshed, Rosenwald added.
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“In April of 1983, there was a terrorist bombing in Beirut targeting U.S. Marines,” he said. “Then, in October, there was the more famous and deadly terrorist attack, one that killed 241 American soldiers. Thirteen months later, Ronald Reagan was reelected in a landslide.”
