With packed airplanes leaving Kabul as the United States hurtles toward the Aug. 31 deadline to withdraw from Afghanistan, Vice President Kamala Harris dispensed Christmas shopping advice from a great distance.
“The stories that we are now hearing about the caution that if you want to have Christmas toys for your children it might be the time to start buying them because the delay may be many, many months,” Harris warned during a roundtable discussion in Singapore earlier this week.
She opened her speech on the strategic importance of the Indo-Pacific region, with references to the situation in Afghanistan — “We are laser-focused on the task at hand,” she said of efforts to evacuate Americans and allies — but focused on Southeast Asia.
“At the same time, it is also imperative that as we address developments in one region, we continue to advance our interests in other regions, including this region,” Harris said on Tuesday.
ONCE A POINT OF AGREEMENT, BIDEN AND TRUMP TRADE BLAME ON AFGHANISTAN
Aside from her claim to be the last person in the room when President Joe Biden decided to complete the pullout from Afghanistan back in April when it was relatively uncontroversial, Harris has kept a low profile on the chaos in Kabul.
Harris has played the good soldier, touting the success of the drawdown even as the images out of Afghanistan have helped move the polls against her boss. But she has been less prominent as a public face for the policy than Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, or Biden himself.
Perhaps that is appropriate, given Blinken, Austin, and Sullivan’s portfolios and Biden’s statement, “The buck stops with me.” But it does create the impression that Harris, the likeliest 2024 Democratic presidential nominee if the now 78-year-old Biden isn’t a candidate, is keeping herself out of the line of fire — and risks making her appear out of the loop.
“Listen, this is a difficult mission,” Harris said of the Afghanistan evacuations while in Singapore. She has participated in security briefings with Biden.
But as Kabul teetered on the brink, Harris met with CEOs about Biden’s childcare proposals — a public event cut short so she could receive intelligence about the Taliban’s offensive.
It was reminiscent of Harris’s first high-profile assignment as vice president when she was tasked with another Biden-era chaotic mess: the crisis at the border. She waited six months to visit the border, traveling to El Paso only after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott publicly invited former President Donald Trump to make a similar visit. She told an interviewer she did not understand the outcry because she had not recently been to Europe either.
Harris and her team tried to clarify she wasn’t responsible for the physical border, which remained in the purview of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, but instead sought to address the root causes of mass migration from Central America.
“The vice president is not doing the border,” her senior adviser and top spokeswoman Symone Sanders said in March. “It’s diplomatic work that needs to be done, and Vice President Harris is looking forward to doing it.”
Even that diplomatic work was not perceived as going swimmingly, with the vice president skipping two-thirds of the Northern Triangle countries on her initial trip. When Harris finally traveled to the border, critics complained the bulk of her itinerary was far away from ground zero for the migration surge.
Harris may similarly find it difficult to win on Afghanistan. She has said enough to be clearly branded as a supporter of the Biden policy and has taken some credit for the withdrawal decision. But her efforts to hone her foreign policy credentials have largely taken her to other parts of the globe, where she has sought to reassure allies unnerved by the situation in Kabul.
The vice president has instead seen her travel diverted by a Havana syndrome-like health incident and endured jokes about having Saigon, the scene of a previous embarrassing evacuation of U.S. diplomatic personnel following an unsuccessful long-term military intervention, on her schedule after Kabul fell.
Nevertheless, Harris has her defenders.
“She’s restored ties and proven to be a leader on the world stage,” author and politician Bakari Sellers tweeted about Harris’s Asia trip. “Won’t get much press bc it’s gone extremely well.”
“It’s only right that she gets to take a backseat on this,” said a Democratic strategist. “They’ve given her all the hard jobs, she needs to have issues where she can have some success.”
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An Echelon Insights/Washington Examiner poll taken this month found Harris would be the front-runner among Democrats nationwide if Biden did not run in 2024, with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg the only other prospect to break into the double digits.
“With the exception of [Dick] Cheney, who had an outsized role, I don’t think a lot of people pay attention to the vice president until something happens to the president,” said Mark Sanford, the former Republican congressman and governor of South Carolina whose book Two Roads Diverged was released on Wednesday.
