President Joe Biden may disagree with former President Donald Trump over who is to blame for the messy exit from Afghanistan, but both bet voters would be more responsive to ending the war than watching the images of Taliban advances on their televisions.
“The images from the past couple of days at the [Kabul] airport have been heartbreaking,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. “But President Biden had to think about the human costs of the alternative path as well, which was to stay in the middle of a civil conflict in Afghanistan.”
“I’m now the fourth American president to preside over war in Afghanistan — two Democrats and two Republicans,” Biden said in the East Room on Monday. “I will not pass this …. responsibility on to a fifth president.”
ONCE A POINT OF AGREEMENT, BIDEN AND TRUMP TRADE BLAME ON AFGHANISTAN
Biden’s predecessor was also confident public support for drawdowns in Afghanistan would persist even against the backdrop of peace talks with the Taliban or a more aggressive withdrawal date than Biden followed — an idea that did not come to fruition. Trump had set May 1 as his goal for ending the war, though he was unable to complete the withdrawal during his term.
In the immediate term, Biden has taken a hit in public opinion. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted Monday pegged his job approval rating at 46% among U.S. adults. This is down 7 points from the 53% the president posted before Kabul fell.
The midterm elections are over a year away, and 2024 is even further off, giving Biden time to recover as conditions change in Afghanistan or other events push the war-torn country off the front page. But some observers believe the political damage could prove less ephemeral.
“I’ve always been a believer that even a small presence in Afghanistan kept this country safe from another 9/11. So, to me, both Trump and Biden are dead wrong about this ‘endless wars’ garbage,” said Jim Dornan, a veteran Republican strategist. “If that’s the case, why are we in Japan, South Korea, the Balkans, and Germany? I don’t see voters clamoring for us to leave any of those places. And the fact that both of them negotiated with these terrorists and thought they could ‘reason’ with them really galls me.”
The Biden administration argued the status quo was unsustainable with the number of troops and the agreement with the Taliban they inherited from Trump’s team.
“There are those who argue that with 2,500 forces — the number of forces in-country when President Biden took office — we could have sustained a stable, peaceful Afghanistan. That is simply wrong,” Sullivan said. “The previous administration drew down from 15,000 troops to 2,500. And even at 15,000, the Afghan government forces were losing ground. What has unfolded over the past month has proven decisively that it would have taken a significant American troop presence, multiple times greater than what President Biden was handed, to stop a Taliban onslaught.”
Biden maintained his only alternative to honoring the Trump agreement with the Taliban was to commence another Afghan troop surge, a policy he advised against as vice president in 2009.
“Therefore, when I became President, I faced a choice — follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our forces and our allies’ forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict,” he said in a written statement over the weekend.
Whether the Biden administration has done enough with the extension to extricate American and allied personnel safely remains in dispute.
“They thought they had more time to figure this out,” said counterterrorism expert Jason Killmeyer. “A week ago, they still hadn’t answered whether they were going to provide air support to the Afghan government after the 31st.”
Now, that government is gone.
“One of the reasons the Biden administration struggled so much with the withdrawal decision was due to optics,” Adam Weinstein, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said last month as the Taliban advanced and accompanying GOP criticism mounted. “The idea that the default position is that it is inherently reasonable to occupy a country for 20 years is so obviously a DC-ism.”
“In 2010, [Biden] told Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, that the U.S. had to leave Afghanistan regardless of the consequences for women or anyone else,” writes George Packer, who authored a Holbrooke biography.
Packer quoted Biden as saying, “F*** that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE IN THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
This sounds like quotations frequently attributed to Trump, though the former president and his team have contended they would have dealt more forcefully with the Taliban than Biden.
“It hurts them both no matter how hard Trump tries to differentiate himself from Biden on this issue,” Dornan said. “It’s just that it happened on Biden’s watch, and that’s going to really hurt him, especially if you throw it in with his immigration debacle, inflation, crime rates, and whatever else happens between now and 2022.”
