We are observing the second anniversary of one of America’s worst foreign policy fiascos, the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was on August 26, 2021, when 13 American Marines and at least 170 Afghan civilians were murdered by a Taliban bomber at the Kabul airport. To say that the anniversary has passed quietly is an understatement.
A writer for the Atlantic, Franklin Foer, has an upcoming book on the withdrawal called The Last Politician. An excerpt was made public today, and several media outlets covered it.
Politico tries its best to uphold its party’s line, but it isn’t easy:
By the end of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, President Joe Biden was sure he made the right decision after watching the events unfold in the Situation Room.
“Biden didn’t have time to voraciously consume the news, but he was well aware of the coverage, and it infuriated him. It did little to change his mind, though,” Franklin Foer writes in his upcoming book, an excerpt of which was released Tuesday. “In fact, everything he’d witnessed from his seat in the Situation Room confirmed his belief that exiting a war without hope was the best and only course.”
Nice try, but the question isn’t whether it was appropriate to withdraw from Afghanistan. The question is whether the withdrawal was bungled, resulting in the needless deaths of Americans and Afghans. And it obviously was bungled: shutting down military operations and withdrawing soldiers first, and worrying about civilians afterward, was incomprehensibly stupid.
Politico can’t entirely sugarcoat the disaster, and its account is harrowing:
In the excerpt, Foer depicts a scene that went viral of the withdrawal: when dozens of Afghans climbed onto the side of a jet to escape the country.
“Only after the plane had lifted into the air did the crew discover its place in history,” Foer writes. “When the pilot couldn’t fully retract the landing gear, a member of the crew went to investigate, staring out of a small porthole. Through the window, it was possible to see scattered human remains.”
But Politico never mentions the 13 dead Marines.
The New York Post reports on the same book excerpt, from a different perspective:
President Biden overestimated his own competence in foreign affairs ahead of the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, making unhelpful and impractical suggestions while displaying a “swaggering faith in himself” that left his administration unprepared for the devastating chaos of the evacuation of Kabul, according to a forthcoming book.
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“For a man vaunted for his empathy, he could be detached, even icy, when confronted with the prospect of human suffering,” Foer wrote of Biden, who was caught apparently looking at his watch while attending the dignified transfer of 13 service members killed in an ISIS-K suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport and allegedly told the mother of one of the victims that her son’s death was just like that of his late son Beau.“When it came to foreign policy,” Foer added, “Joe Biden possessed a swaggering faith in himself.”
Of course, the relevant issue is not empathy, but competence. And the senescent Joe Biden had no idea what he was doing, as both the Politico and Post accounts make clear. The Post’s story is much longer. A brief excerpt:
As early as June 2021, national security adviser Jake Sullivan “began to worry that the Pentagon had pulled American personnel and materiel out of Afghanistan too precipitously,” according to Foer.
The “rapid drawdown” of US forces in the country — which began that May — “had allowed the Taliban to advance and win a string of victories” against the Afghan military, which “caught the administration by surprise.”
Gen. Frank McKenzie, then head of US Central Command, soon warned that evacuation efforts should begin sooner, filing an estimate that Kabul could be “surrounded within about 30 days — a far faster collapse than previously predicted.”
But the Biden administration failed to heed McKenzie’s advice, with the State Department delaying the start of the evacuation mission “to avoid cultivating a sense of panic in Kabul” — a sentiment that Foer wrote was backed by the CIA.
The pullout would not be declared until mid-August, after Milley begged Sullivan to push Biden to make the call with the Taliban under 100 miles from Kabul.
The disaster was compounded error by error, with the result that hundreds were needlessly murdered and, to this day, translators and others who helped our cause and were left behind are being hunted down by the Taliban. If Joe Biden has ever regretted the consequences of his incompetence, he has kept such concerns to himself.
Foer’s book includes this Biden quote:
According to Foer, “everything [Biden had] witnessed from his seat in the Situation Room confirmed his belief that exiting a war without hope was the best and only course.”
As for the angry reaction, Biden considered it “overheated,” reportedly telling an aide that “either the press is losing its mind, or I am.”
Biden is so far gone that, not only does he not care about 13 dead American Marines, along with hundreds of Afghans, he can’t understand why anyone else would care, either.
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