Biden Is Feeling the Heat over Afghanistan. And He Should Be.

Not the photo any of us wanted to see.
But it was pretty predictable.

First off, the situation in Afghanistan is a debacle of enormous magnitude.  Those who would excuse the incompetence of the decision-makers by saying that the withdrawal was overdue are simultaneously correct and disingenuous.  The US’s presence in Afghanistan had been a money pit for decades, and the twin evils of mission creep and presumed allies who were the perfect combination of fecklessness and corruption long since ensured that there would be no “successful” outcome to the mission. 

But it wasn’t the fact of the retreat or even its timing that’s at issue: it’s the utter lack of planning, the carelessness with respect to the lives of non-military personnel (both American and Afghani), and the stench of mendacity emanating from every official source from the President on down that makes the right wing outraged.  Many critics, of course, blather about how stupid we all were to elect Joe Biden.  Curmie would agree, except for one thing: the alternative was Donald Trump.

Curmie has noted earlier that “Joe Biden won the election not by being a strong leader, an intellectual, or even a fundamentally honest candidate: he’s none of those things. His entire candidacy was based on a single issue: he was Not Trump.”  Curmie voted for him on that basis, and would do so again, given the only other plausible choice.  Curmie has voted against Trump twice, both times “for” a candidate he despised a little less than he did the venal buffoon whose disastrous presidency we recently endured.  (Side note: Curmie would have supported the 1988 version of Joe Biden, just as he might well have supported the 2000 version of John McCain.  But timing matters.)

Did Curmie suspect that Biden would show less managerial acumen than the average freshman who’s assistant stage managed a production Curmie directed?  Let’s just say it wasn’t a surprise.  Right wing talking heads now bluster about how we should have known that Biden would sell out our allies and compromise American assets (both personnel and equipment), allowing them to fall into the hands of unfriendlies if not outright enemies.  These people casually forget, of course, that Biden’s predecessor had already done precisely the same thing with respect to Syria and the Kurds.

So we’re left with a choice between someone who might do something colossally stupid in central or western Asia and someone who had already done so.  To be fair, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was handled with even less finesse than the departure from Syria.  On the other hand, there’s a case to be made that the betrayal of allies was even worse in ethical terms in the latter case.  In both instances, the defense of the action was that the action had to be taken because continued presence could not be justified. In both cases, this argument was demonstrably true… and demonstrably insufficient.

The one difference other than minor matters of scale between the two withdrawals is in the response from politicians.  Even leading Republicans criticized Trump’s maneuvers, but Democrats are trying to see if obfuscatory rhetoric will work to protect Biden from the opprobrium he deserves.

Or does he?  Please note, in advance, that this argument applies equally well to Trump in 2019 and Biden in 2021.  Yes, we all know about “the buck stops here” and similar political adages, whether or not they were in fact applied by their presumed adherents.  But the fact is that the details of these operations weren’t, directly at least, under the auspices of the Commander-in-Chief.  

Curmie freely admits that he doesn’t know much about how these things work, but it’s unlikely that Biden (or Trump) micromanaged the withdrawals.  It’s difficult to believe that the President (either one) was much concerned with whether X came before or after Y.  Those guys just said, “We want out by such-and-such a date.  Make it happen.”  It’s the military who seems to have fucked things up royally in both cases.  All the Presidents did was try to take a little heat off the generals.  Whereas this might seem out of character, especially for Trump, it’s pretty much what happened.

It doesn’t help that no American President for the last 40 years has had a clue what to do with Afghanistan, a virtually medieval nation with literally nothing to offer except the real estate standby of location, location, location.  A pretty good case could be made that every President in that period has changed course and has managed only to bungle things worse than his predecessor. 

So whereas Biden may really be guilty only of inheriting an insoluble situation and trusting in a military establishment that let him (and all of us) down, the fact that he’s getting hammered for it is perfectly reasonable.  In the world of politics, the person in power gets the credit if things go right and the blame if things go wrong, end of story.  And that leaves President Biden in a big hole and all he knows to do is keep digging.