The Media Manufactured Biden's Political 'Fiasco' in Afghanistan
Straight news has chosen sanctimony over circumspection.
Americas withdrawal from Afghanistan has yet to cost our nation a single casualty. Evacuations of U.S. citizens and allies from Kabuls airport are proceeding at a faster pace than the White House had promised, or than its critics had deemed possible. Afghanistans decades-long civil war has reached a lull, if not an end. On the streets of Kabul, order and quiet have replaced rising crime and violence. Meanwhile, the Taliban is negotiating with former Afghan president Hamid Karzai over the establishment of an inclusive government acceptable to all Afghans.
In other words, Joe Bidens withdrawal from Afghanistan has been a disastrous and humiliating fiasco, in the words of the mainstream medias ostensibly objective foreign-policy journalists.
This may be an accurate description of what recent events in Kabul have meant for the president, politically. The latest polls have shown sharp drops in Bidens approval rating, driven in part by widespread opposition to the way his administration handled its (otherwise popular) exit from Afghanistan. Yet this political fiasco is not a development that the media covered so much as one that it created.
The Biden administration made some genuine errors of contingency planning. It could have done (and should now do) more to facilitate the mass resettlement of Afghan refugees. But as far as conclusions to multi-decade wars go, Americas withdrawal from Afghanistan is thus far proceeding with relatively little chaos and tragedy. And its far from clear that the withdrawal could have been much more orderly had the White House only executed it in a better way.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/media-bias-biden-polls-approval-afghanistan-withdrawal.html