President Joe Biden’s foreign policy chops have been tested and his administration’s reputation for policy precision questioned after the Afghan government’s implosion.
Biden and his aides are being criticized by Republicans and Democrats alike for the United States’s botched exit from Afghanistan after hundreds of Afghans, including allies, descended on Kabul’s international airport, the only way out of the country and away from a potentially vengeful Taliban regime.
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The fall of U.S.-backed Afghanistan is immensely problematic for Biden, according to political analyst Dan Schnur, a Republican-turned-independent at the University of California. Not solely because of the policy and geopolitical ramifications, Schnur said, but because it also undermines Biden’s standing as a president who understands the federal government and wanted to rebuild U.S. credibility overseas.
“It’s a lot harder for him to make those cases now, and it will harm him politically,” he told the Washington Examiner.
Afghanistan appears to be a misstep for Biden, agreed Costas Panagopoulos, a Northeastern University politics professor and commentator. But it may not be politically fatal to the president, he said, depending on what comes next.
“One mistake, even one as serious as Afghanistan, may not sink Biden, but an ongoing series will do lasting damage,” Panagopoulos added.”Unfortunately for Biden, however, this miscalculation will put every other decision and policy under the microscope and give fodder to critics seeking to fuel attacks.”
Developments are still playing out in Afghanistan, but Biden’s statements are already being more closely examined. His assurances, for instance, that the Taliban’s ascendance was “not inevitable” and that there would be “zero” echoes between Afghanistan and the emergency evacuations from Saigon after the Vietnam War are being reassessed.
White House talking points are aimed at spinning those past Afghanistan comments. Aides, for example, had “planned for every possibility,” which is why 7,000-odd troops were “repositioned in the region,” ready to deploy if needed, according to an internal document.
“The administration knew that there was a distinct possibility that Kabul would fall to the Taliban,” the document states. “It was not an inevitability. It was a possibility.”
But Biden’s insistence Monday during a hastily organized White House speech that the Afghan government and people were partly to blame for extraction delays exacerbated the perception the administration had bungled the operation.
“I do not regret my decision to end America’s war-fighting in Afghanistan,” he said before returning to Camp David.
It is not an impression Biden is familiar with after his team was mostly lauded for its coronavirus vaccine rollout. The president also touted his own foreign policy prowess as a longtime chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the campaign trail.
No foreign policy expert is “seasoned enough to infallibly predict the future,” particularly in Afghanistan, according to Tom Cochran, a partner at public affairs firm 720 Strategies and an alumnus of former President Barack Obama’s State Department.
“It’s incredibly complex, and if you’re the last one to make an impactful decision prior to the Afghan government’s collapse, do you own their failure?” he asked.
For Cochran, Biden is not wholly responsible for what is unfolding in Afghanistan after two decades and four administrations since the U.S. invaded the country to degrade al Qaeda following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“We love pointing fingers, but let’s turn that finger on ourselves as a nation and acknowledge that this is our failure as Americans,” he said. “Biden will assume the unfair burden of being the one behind the Resolute Desk because he was the last one to pull a Jenga block out before the whole thing came crashing down.”
At the same time, Cochran admitted video footage emerging from Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport is “beyond a human catastrophe.” Seven people have died as the U.S. and its counterparts try to airlift citizens and Afghans who supported them to safety. Some of the dead include those who clung to the fuselage of a departing U.S. military plane in a desperate attempt to flee.
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“What’s happening in Afghanistan is tragic and heartbreaking, and I say that as the father of three little girls … What if they were growing up under sharia law, completely marginalized, unable to get an education or frankly do anything?” Cochran said.
