Opinion: Biden gave the best possible defense of his Afghanistan withdrawal - Jennifer Rubin

[question everything]

President Biden’s case for the fruitlessness of a continued military mission in Afghanistan got a boost as the Afghan army melted away, and its leaders fled practically overnight. During remarks from the White House on Monday, Biden made a strong point — one likely to find receptive ears among voters — that he refuses to maintain the lie to Americans that victory is around the corner.

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The assumption that Afghan helpers are already lost to the butchery of the Taliban, however, smacks of defeatism. The United States must deploy sufficient troops and conduct a massive rescue of the tens of thousands of vulnerable Afghans. Indeed, Biden vowed in his address: “We’re taking over air traffic control. . . . Over the coming days, we intend to transport out thousands of American citizens who have been living and working in Afghanistan,” he vowed. “We will also continue to support the safe departure of the civilian personnel of our allies.” The president’s success in pulling this off will determine how history judges his decision.

The pronouncement from many in the media that the United States has abandoned Afghan allies is premature — the sort of snap judgment common on Twitter but utterly inappropriate in assessing a war in which virtually ever actor has been responsible for gross errors. Could the administration at least be given a chance to try to rescue Afghans, in concert with allies? Could it compensate its wrongfully rosy projections on how long Afghan security forces would last by sending additional forces to remain until we remove our Afghan partners? That’s what Biden proposes; we should pray he follows through.

It is also remarkable that Biden’s critics pronounce with so much certainty that a small military force would have be able to protect the status quo in Afghanistan. Given the misconceptions about the strength of the Afghan army, the corruption of the Afghan government and the inherent advantages of a domestic insurgency fighting outsiders, this is hardly guaranteed. Biden reiterated that the choice was binary: remove the troops, or see a full-on assault from the Taliban and the call for even more U.S. troops. We do not know whether this is correct, and I maintain the Biden administration should have at least tried to retain a small military force.

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In sum, Biden gave the best speech under the circumstances. He was not defensive. He literally said that the “buck stops with me.” The public will reward him if the withdrawal does not lead to a repeat of 9/11. And they will forgive him the chaos if he gets thousands of innocents out of the Taliban hellhole.


https://wapo.st/3AVKn2F

[MatthewG.]

1. Biden was given a bad hand and played it as best as he could.

I basically agree with Rubin here; I feel Biden was given a bad hand by his predecessors and played it as best as he could. The Afghan war was long-ago lost and likely unwinnable from day one; on top of that, the Pentagon and its generals seem to have botched things mightily and repeatedly lied about and hid unpleasant truths.

It was an ugly debacle, and Biden probably did the best thing he could do, which is fold rather than double down on an unwinnable war. The pullout wasn’t handled well, but a lot of that seems to be the fault of lousy, overly-optimistic intelligence assessments regarding the situation. His speech struck me as a reasonably clear explanation to the public of why he took a difficult but necessary decision.

I don’t think anyone could describe this a stellar moment for Biden’s administration, but it was an adult one, painful but needed. I actually had dental surgery today and that wasn’t a lot of fun either, but if I had put it off for a year or three, that might have saved me short term stress and pain but would have led to even more unpleasantness at some future point.

Politically, voters aren’t going to like seeing the chaos, but I’m not sure how much they’re going to care about the issue in a few months, and I don’t think anybody not still part of the dying and discredited neoconservative movement seriously thinks Afghanistan was a winnable conflict. It certainly doesn’t seem like our military establishment learned a heck of a lot from Vietnam. I’d also say this ending to the conflict firmly secures Bush Jr’s place as the worst President of the last fifty years or more. (Yes, I think his two disastrous wars caused more damage than Trump’s administration, even if Trump was probably the worst human being to ever sit in the Oval Office.) I do hope Biden can save as many Afghan refugees as possible: surely we owe Afghans who cooperated with America’s occupation that much.

The Middle East remains a turbulent hotspot, and in the future the United States can hopefully redefine its geopolitical interests in a more modest way. America’s credibility as a superpower is shot, but what else is new? I think we all know the days of a unipolar world are behind us, and the United States isn’t going to dominate the 21st Century the way it did the 20th.