I believe that Pres. Joe Biden was wrong to pull U.S. troops from Afghanistan and that his administration’s handling of the withdrawal was disastrous. I still support Biden and it’s not because I’m a partisan Democrat.
Yesterday was the darkest day of Biden’s administration and among the worst for America in recent years. The 13 American military personnel and dozens of Afghans killed by suicide bombers converted a decision that was a human rights and strategic mistake into a nightmare. And Biden owns it. He didn’t have to accept the awful agreement with the Taliban “negotiated” by Donald Trump. And once he accepted it, the execution of the withdrawal was all on him and his team.
Republicans are trying to transform this into questions about Biden’s basic competence. There’s good political reason for that. While three in four Americans thought Biden had fumbled the withdrawal even before yesterday’s attacks, two-thirds of Americans wanted out of Afghanistan. Until yesterday, it seemed likely that the mess in Kabul would fade from memory and Biden would reap the benefits of having finally ended a “forever war.”
Time will tell just how lasting yesterday’s tragedy will be in American memory, but it’s still possible that, in the long-run, most Americans will view it as a terrible inevitability in the service of a bigger goal. That’s why Republicans need to use it as a bludgeon to try to knock out one of the pillars of Biden’s popularity: the idea that he is competent.
And that’s one of the reasons that I still support Biden. I believe that he, and most of the people surrounding him, are competent. That confidence has been severely shaken by Afghanistan, at least for the President’s foreign policy team. But compared to the gross incompetence of Trump and his White House, Biden is still much, much better.
In addition, nothing in Biden’s handling of Afghanistan calls into question his fundamental decency. While I think he made the wrong set of calculations in deciding to leave, there’s no question that he believes it was the best thing to do in the long-term interests of the United States. With Trump you always had to look for the evidence of ego or personal self-dealing in all of his decisions. Here, Biden did what he said he would do during his campaign. His motivations are not in question.
But the most important reason that I’m sticking with Biden is that he understands that this is a crucial moment in the fight for liberal democracy, both at home and abroad. He sees his infrastructure and social spending packages as demonstrations that democracy can work to solve big problems. And up until now, he has begun to restore the faith of our allies that America will play an active role in defending and promoting liberal democracy throughout the world. While Afghanistan deals a serious blow to that posture, it doesn’t destroy it. He has time to rebuild it.
Yesterday was an awful day. There may be more awful days to come. But I remind myself that a year ago everything was so much worse under Donald Trump. And I remind myself that there’s so much at stake in Joe Biden’s success or failure.
Note: With regard to Afghanistan, I share the views of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s liberal columnist Trudy Rubin. Rubin has written an excellent piece answering some key questions about the withdrawal.
Welcome to the 191st day of consecutive posts here at YSDA. Thanks for reading.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
I agree it was an awful day, but really just one day that shows ineffective twenty years old present continuous. Bringing liberal democracy to a place like Afghanistan is not easy, so that question of “who’s fault is it” in invalid. We tired hard to do something very difficult, and we failed. Occasional failure is a natural result of setting reach goals. Foreign policy experts will be studying it for decades. I’m sad for people in Afghanistan who wanted freedom and prosperity and are not going to get it any time soon.
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I think we set ourselves up for failure when the goal became establishing a stable government in Kabul. The realistic and achievable primary goal was to keep terrorism at bay and to disrupt any effort to repeat 9/11. A secondary benefit was that our presence allowed a generation of Afghans to grow up with the benefits of liberal democracy. Had we stayed longer — and that could have been much longer, I admit — that might have taken hold there.
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Or as the always insightful Babylon Bee characterized the response of many liberal writers like Ms. Rubin and our dear former mayor:
“This is going to be shorter than usual, as I have a very tight deadline since I hear the Taliban breaking into my building, but I just have to say what an excellent job President Biden has done during the evacuation of Afghanistan. The withdrawal has really emphasized that he was the right man for the job.”
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I’ve been very hard on Biden with regard to Afghanistan — both the decision to leave and the execution of the decision. I think that in other areas of foreign and domestic policy he’s done quite well. Before this his national approval numbers showed that most Americans agreed. My challenge to my conservative readers is to apply the same standard to Donald Trump and other Republicans. But thanks for calling me “dear.”
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Hey cheese. Sounds like you are wavering on Joe.
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No. I’m not. I’m disappointed in him on Afghanistan. That’s the extent of it.
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