It goes without saying that Republicans are pretty disturbed by the Biden administration’s incompetent, neglectful, poorly planned, and disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. But quite a few Democratic officeholders in Washington, who don’t see it as their job to go down with President Joe Biden’s ship, have also rightly condemned the embarrassing, panicked, deadly flight by U.S. forces.
Neither is it just Americans. The same European parliamentarians with whom Biden boasted he would repair relations after Donald Trump are flabbergasted and rethinking their cooperation with the United States. Their acid comments about Biden have been diplomatically polite yet merciless. One prominent German leader stated that the disorderly withdrawal “does fundamental damage to the political and moral credibility of the West.” A top diplomat for the European Union remarked that the Afghan disaster “shows that Europe needs to develop this famous ‘strategic autonomy’ in order to be ready to face challenges that affect us eventually.” He was invoking Trump-era language about Biden being an unreliable ally.
Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the British Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, took to Twitter and called it “the biggest foreign policy disaster since Suez,” adding, “We need to think again about how we handle friends.”
Biden “hasn’t just humiliated America’s Afghan allies,” a former British Cabinet minister told the New York Times. “He’s humiliated his Western allies by demonstrating their impotence.”
Afghanistan is the low point of Biden’s presidency so far — an event so humiliating that it could force him not to seek reelection. That’s how bad this is.
But there are those, mostly White House employees and their closest allies in the media, who are still out there trying to spin this as some kind of “success” for the administration. Their effort to minimize Biden’s mistake is reprehensible and insults the intelligence of everyone within earshot.
The Washington Post’s Jen Rubin, for example, compared Biden’s last-minute, slapdash effort to get not quite everyone out of Afghanistan to Oskar Schindler saving hundreds of Jews from the Holocaust. The comparison is inapt for many reasons, not least of which is that Schindler had not just created the murderous danger that was overwhelming the Jews. Biden is not a hero for inadequately cleaning up his own mess.
The Atlantic’s David Rothkopf thinks “Americans should feel proud” that our military fled a weaker enemy in a disorderly panic, leaving behind tens of billions of dollars’ worth of lethal weapons, despite having an unlimited amount of time to prepare an orderly retreat. He thinks it’s impressive that U.S. forces got as many as 120,000 people out of Afghanistan in the arbitrarily short amount of time Biden gave them. Only a few hundred Americans were left stranded — and don’t forget the countless Afghan allies left behind, whose only mistake was to work with a country that has become feckless enough to elect Joe Biden as its president.
You can tell that Rubin, Rothkopf, and so many other “uh, I meant to do that” apologists are disingenuous because they keep invoking the same straw man counterargument that Biden invokes in speech after self-justifying speech. “We had to leave Afghanistan,” they all say — a statement irrelevant to the discussion. They are trying to confuse people by conflating the popular decision to leave Afghanistan with Biden’s incompetent and unpopular execution of that policy.
The vast, vast majority of voters and even Biden’s Republican predecessor and 2020 opponent all agreed that the U.S. should leave Afghanistan. So did we. But Biden’s precipitous withdrawal, which has caused more service members’ deaths than the last several years of combat with the Taliban, has been such a disaster that new polling suggests it has nearly soured voters on a sensible decision they had strongly supported.
There are stubborn facts that the Biden apologists cannot get around. These include Biden’s reassurances about how the withdrawal would go and the stranding of hundreds of Americans.
But one fact really stands out, and any attempt to spin it as “success” implies that Biden is a genius for gifting the Taliban 43,000 pickup trucks, 22,000 Humvees, 900 mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, 600,000 guns, and more than 200 aircraft paid for by U.S. taxpayers.
Did Biden really intend to do that? If so, he should be impeached, not praised.
If, on the other hand, this is the byproduct of the Biden administration’s worst failure yet and the worst U.S. foreign policy disaster in decades, then voters will have a chance to rectify the situation.
