The Question Biden Needs to Answer

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, September 23, 2021

 

Whenever something awful happens in our government, there is a kind of informal competition among columnists to be the first to write: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”

 

It is a tedious cliché. But the matter of the Kabul drone strike in which U.S. forces killed ten innocent civilians — including an aid worker and seven children — raises precisely that question. Joe Biden as commander in chief bears some general culpability for this slaughter — but if he was leaning on his underlings to put some bodies into body bags in order to grease the political skids with their blood, then his culpability is more intimate.

 

The bungled, headlong U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has been an embarrassment to the Biden administration (to say nothing of the country), and even President Biden’s staunchest allies have found it difficult to defend his team’s performance in this matter. His competency has been called into question by people who are not normally inclined to do so in public.

 

Naturally, those inclined to think the worst of Joe Biden have had a lot to say, too, much of it both valid and valuable. A specific accusation put forward by some Republicans is that President Biden, embarrassed by the terrorist bombing at Abbey Gate that killed more U.S. troops in Afghanistan than any single attack in more than a decade, was desperate to be seen offering a robust response and therefore put political pressure on the military, encouraging the kind of sloppy work behind that led to that fateful drone attack. The charge, in short, is that Joe Biden burned ten innocents on the altar of his political ambitions.

 

Mike Pompeo is one high-profile critic who has put forward that line of criticism. Pompeo is understood to be positioning himself as a Republican presidential contender in 2024. But, whatever you think of Pompeo as a politician, he is also a former secretary of state and former director of the CIA. As such, he is reasonably well versed in how these targeting decisions are made, what fail-safes are in place to avoid a massacre of civilians such as the one just perpetrated by U.S. forces, and the ways in which political pressure can influence the process.

 

“It looks like they were in a rush,” Pompeo told Fox News. “They were in a hurry. You could see the political pressure. And if there was one thing that drove this failed evacuation, it was the arbitrary political deadline that President Biden set.”

 

John Castorani is another Republican office seeker (he is running for the House from Virginia’s seventh district) who has come to the same conclusion. Like Pompeo, he has some experience in these matters, but a little closer to the ground: He is a combat veteran and intelligence officer who spent much of his career in Africa tracking down — successfully, in the end — the organizers of the attack in Benghazi that took the lives of four Americans, including an ambassador. He was deployed to both Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Syria.

 

“In layman’s terms,” he says, “I have a lot of experience with the targeting side and tactical intelligence.”

 

There is much about that Kabul strike that looks questionable to him: For one thing, it is unusual to conduct such a strike inside a city; for another, there is a formal process for reviewing such operations for the presence of women and children. Castorani talks about the “deconfliction” protocol. “If I have a target that I’m tracking, and I’m confident it’s him, I’m looking for corroborating intelligence. You want human intelligence, geospatial intelligence, and signal intelligence, and then you start spinning up.”

 

(“Deconfliction” is a bit of jargon that enjoyed some brief journalistic prominence when it was used to describe the efforts of Russian and U.S. forces in Syria not to kill each other by accident.)

 

In the immediate term, the catastrophic error in Kabul points to a failure of the Biden administration. But in Castorani’s view, it also points to a failure of Congress. “I wasn’t there, but I can almost assure you that there was executive-branch pressure put on Centcom to get a strike off. There are questions that need to be asked by members of Congress. What was the intelligence that brought you to the conclusion that you could strike that target? Our legislative body should be informed. If not in public, then at least in a SCIF.”

 

(That’s “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility,” a term you may remember from one of the impeachments of Donald Trump.)

 

But that isn’t happening. It probably won’t happen in the near future.

 

Biden’s party controls Congress — for now — which means that effective oversight is unlikely — for now.

 

But Americans will wonder: Who made the call on that drone strike? And, Biden being Biden: What did the president know, and did he know that he knew it?