The Afghanistan-Withdrawal Disaster, Revisited

National Review Online

Tuesday, September 10, 2024

 

The catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan is in the news again, as Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee released the results of their investigation into what might well prove the nadir of the Biden presidency.

 

Kabul was the disaster that set off a string of geopolitical setbacks for America and the West, with Putin and the ayatollah sizing up this White House — and liking their odds.

 

Heads should have rolled, but this 350-page report — and perhaps the November election — is as close as we’ll come to accountability.

 

President Biden, of course, admitted no mistakes at the time. He didn’t fire any of his top officials. And to this day, the administration defends every last aspect of that dishonorable month in 2021.

 

The president and his top aides have expressed no regret for any of it. Not for the 13 dead American service members at Abbey Gate, nor for the Americans left behind, nor for the military equipment that fell into the hands of the Taliban and, likely, Iran.

 

The report establishes in detail how the decision for the withdrawal was driven from the top by a President Biden who ignored warnings from military officials, diplomats, and allies that he was courting disaster. He claims that Donald Trump’s (lamentable) Doha agreement to get out of Afghanistan if the Taliban adhered to certain conditions forced his hand, but the Taliban didn’t meet those conditions.

 

Biden just wanted to get out by a date certain, regardless of anything the Taliban did and regardless of conditions on the ground. Then, as the Taliban predictably gained ground and the Afghan government tottered, we didn’t prepare for the worst-case contingencies we ourselves were creating. The report goes into detail, for instance, on the failure to prepare a noncombatant evacuation operation.

 

The report was met with lockstep pushback from the White House and congressional Democrats who blame Trump for a botched evacuation that the former president had nothing to do with.

 

On Monday morning, the State Department issued an unusually lengthy statement accusing Republicans of having “issued partisan statements, cherry-picked facts, withheld testimonies from the American people, and obfuscated the truth behind conjecture.”

 

That criticism comes from an administration that for years has obfuscated its own missteps and strained to hide from the committee a State Department dissent cable that related the alarm of staff at the embassy in Kabul.

 

The probe was only as partisan as Democrats made it; rather than push for accountability, lawmakers from the committee’s minority did everything they could to obstruct the investigation.

 

Almost without exception, mainstream news outlets have taken their cues from the White House. Rather than take up the failures presented in the report, most of the reporting that has come out this week so far adopts the administration’s perspective — that this was an unwarranted, partisan exercise.

 

Implicit, of course, in that line is the idea that Vice President Kamala Harris, who boasted of being the last person in the room when Biden opted for a full withdrawal, ought to shoulder no blame for this national disgrace, which she has steadfastly defended.

 

There’s no undoing the damage done from Biden’s withdrawal, but at least now we have an extensive record of the stubbornness, wishful thinking, and incompetence that created this debacle.