By David Harsanyi
Friday, August
13, 2021
The unfolding disaster in Afghanistan is a bipartisan, trans-administrational failure. It is a humiliation.
Whatever your position is on the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the fact is that after 20 years, after thousands of lives and hundreds of billions spent on the military, police, training, infrastructure and education, the country is likely to fall to radicals in less than 20 days. As of this writing, the Taliban are routing Afghan troops with seeming ease, taking Kandahar, Herat, and closing in on Kabul. The United States has been forced to send 3,000 troops to evacuate Americans to avoid another Fall of Saigon moment.
And for the past 20 years, Joe Biden has been on every side of nearly every position on Afghanistan — usually the wrong one at the wrong time. It’s surreal that a person so uncannily incompetent, so tenaciously wrong on foreign policy, could rise to the presidency, but here we are.
It’s true that support for invading Afghanistan after 9/11 was overwhelming. In October 2001, a CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll found that 88 percent of Americans backed military action abroad, and 66 percent supported “sending large numbers of ground troops into combat in Afghanistan.” The United States was going in to weed out those who attacked us. What about the aftermath?
In the early going, Biden would often hit the Bush administration for its failure to send more troops and increase nation-building efforts. In 2002, after Bush had proposed handing off more policing operations to allies, Biden excoriated the administration. Here is the Washington Post on Feb. 5, 2002:
[Biden] said the failure to establish a solid national government could create a “lawless safe haven for anti-American terrorists.”
“Security is the basic issue in Afghanistan,” Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a Washington speech. “Whatever it takes, we should do it. History will judge us harshly if we allow the hope of a liberated Afghanistan to evaporate because we failed to stay the course.”
Two years later, Biden pushed back against Nicholas Kristof’s suggestion that Democratic Party presidential candidate John Kerry would be more predisposed to pulling back in Afghanistan:
If you take a look at the Bush administration, they basically haven’t done what they in fact indicated they were going to do in Afghanistan, from their Marshall Plan to the amount of troops that they were going to commit, and not having the need for international forces. (Italics mine.)
Biden argued that it was a moral imperative to stay in Afghanistan as long as necessary. As is his wont, he often made that case through colorful personal anecdotes — many of them likely imagined. In a 2004 New Yorker piece, for instance, George Packer finds Biden touring a new school in Kabul:
When the visit was over and Biden started to leave, a young girl stood ramrod straight at her desk and said, “You cannot leave. You cannot leave.”
“I promise I’ll come back,” Biden told her.
“You cannot leave,” the girl insisted. “They will not deny me learning to read. I will read, and I will be a doctor like my mother. I will. America must stay.”
As Biden put it in a recent interview, the Afghan girl was telling him, “Don’t f*** with me, Jack. You got me in here. You said you were going to help me. You better not leave me now.”
One wonders what that girl makes of Biden’s comment yesterday that Afghans must fight for themselves. At the time, Senator Biden alleged that the encounter was “a catalytic event” that defined his philosophy forevermore. We needed to export liberal democracy and embrace a “Prevention Doctrine,” he argued. And both were contingent on expansive American commitments abroad.
In truth, the only “catalytic events” that Biden really seems to react to are disruptions in public polling. By October 2009, when sentiment had shifted against nation-building, we were getting New York Times pieces about Biden with headlines such as, “No Longer a Lone Voice on Afghanistan:
For Mr. Biden, a longtime senator who prided himself on his experience in foreign relations, the role represents an evolution in his own thinking, a shift from his days as a liberal hawk advocating for American involvement in Afghanistan. Month by month, year by year, the story of Mr. Biden’s disenchantment with the Afghan government, and by extension with the engagement there, mirrors America’s slow but steady turn against the war, with just 37 percent supporting more troops in last week’s CBS News poll.
“Year by year” is right. Only one year earlier, during a vice-presidential debate, Biden was still calling for more troops and money in Afghanistan.
In any event, by 2010 Biden was allegedly yelling, “I am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights!” in meetings. In 2012, he gave a speech at West Point praising the Obama’s administration alleged successes in Afghanistan — referring to the assassination of bin Laden in Pakistan as “a mission that will go down in the annals of intelligence and special operations, some of America’s most gifted security professionals.” Biden forgot to mention he opposed greenlighting the kill.
In 2014, Obama gave his much-celebrated speech at West Point, bragging that the United States had “achieve[d] the objectives that took us to war in the first place” and could now “begin a new chapter in the story of American leadership around the world.”
Despite Biden’s alleged skepticism on the matter, Obama had escalated American involvement soon after taking office, sending 30,000 additional military personnel there — a nearly 50 percent jump. And troop levels didn’t peak until 2010. In 2012, there were still 68,000 troops in Afghanistan — and over 70 percent of the Afghan war’s fatalities occurred under Obama-Biden. Obama claimed we were leaving because we could, boasting about the hundreds of thousands of highly trained Afghan troops and policemen who were now on the job.
They weren’t. They still aren’t.
Robert Gates wasn’t kidding when he noted that Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades.” As a senator, he voted against the Persian Gulf War in 1991. A decade later he didn’t merely support the Iraq invasion in 2003, he championed it. (Biden warned Bush, for example, that it was “unrealistic, if not downright foolish,” to claim victory against terrorism until Saddam Hussein was toppled from power in Iraq.) It was only after the campaign’s popularity began fading that he purported to have been hoodwinked by George W. Bush. Biden was for a surge in Afghanistan before he wasn’t, and against the surge in Iraq, even though it was perhaps the most successful post-Saddam operation in the nation. And it was Biden who was charged with implementing Obama’s tragically incompetent withdrawal from Iraq, which was partially responsible for the rise of ISIS — or the “JV team,” as his boss called them.
Then there is the Libya debacle. Trying to untangle Biden’s ever-shifting positions on Authorization for Use of Military Force would take thousands of additional words. Put it this way: On numerous occasions Biden praised Obama’s entry into the Libya conflict — calling it the “prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has in the past” in 2011. When the full extent of its failure was clear, Biden claimed to have “argued strongly” within the White House against getting involved.
In more recent times, Biden was a proponent of the failed Iran deal and a harsh critic of the successful Abraham Accords, an agreement his administration is trying to weaken. As with the elimination of bin Laden, Biden opposed taking out the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps terrorist leader General Qasem Soleimani, accusing Donald Trump of putting us on the precipice of an “endless war in the Middle East.”
Many people will, no doubt, argue that Biden’s positions change to comport with the facts on the ground. Even if that were the case, Biden helped get into the war, and then championed the nation-building and troop buildups. Why is Biden never asked to answer for his positions?
More than all that, it is incumbent on any administration to competently conduct a military withdrawal of its choosing — and, at the very least, avoid humiliation. The Wall Street Journal reports today that the speed of the Taliban advance “surprises” the administration. That, of course, is not surprising. Biden has never shown any special wisdom or competence on foreign policy. As one former Obama Pentagon official put it last year, Biden isn’t really a student of history; he is driven by “gut instincts.”
Indeed. The problem is that his instincts are complete garbage.
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