USA Politics (redux)

[Karl Henning]

Who Takes the Blame?

People are pointing fingers in all directions over President Biden's unfolding foreign-policy crisis.

By Peter Nicholas

Who, exactly, is responsible for today's calamity in Afghanistan? ISIS appears to be the author of this tragedy, but are American officials at fault as well? At least 12 U.S. service members and dozens of Afghan civilians are dead after attacks by a pair of suicide bombers just outside the Kabul airport. The number of casualties is sure to rise.

For that matter, who will Americans blame when they think about the image of desperate Afghans clinging to a departing C-17? Even before the bombings in Kabul, the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan had been intermittently chaotic—some of those lucky enough to escape were transferred to rat- and feces-infested holding facilities in Qatar. A lost war is ending much as it began 20 years ago, with a gruesome terrorist attack targeting Americans.

Prior to today's attacks, Congress had already opened hearings into the Biden administration's handling of the Afghanistan pullout, though Washington has its own ideas of who was culpable. A recent Politico story distilled the city's insistence on finding and shaming a scapegoat in its headline "The Blob Turns on Jake"—a reference to the foreign-policy establishment's current view of Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas, a Republican and ex–Navy Seal who lost his right eye in an explosion while serving in Afghanistan, singled out Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this week. At a private briefing with lawmakers Blinken said the U.S. expected to extract all Americans from Afghanistan by President Joe Biden's August 31 deadline, Crenshaw told me. "I don't like the way the secretary of state toed the line for Biden," he said. "No sane person believes that."

Others are looking outside the White House. When I spoke with Representative Adam Schiff of California on Tuesday, he pointed to the Pentagon. "With all the contingency planning that the Pentagon does, it seems inexplicable that we didn't have a better plan for how this ends," Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, told me. Then there are those blaming the intelligence community, specifically whoever drew the erroneous conclusion that the Afghan military could keep the Taliban at bay for months. "If I were in his [Biden's] shoes, I would examine all the folks dealing with this intelligence—I'd be pretty pissed off," Representative Bill Pascrell of New Jersey told me.

Today's casualties also cast doubt on a core claim that Biden has used to justify the troop pullout—that even without a military presence in Afghanistan, the U.S. can still stave off terrorist attacks. General Kenneth McKenzie of U.S. Central Command said in a briefing today that the airlift from Kabul would continue, despite the threat of terrorist attacks ahead of the August 31 withdrawal date. As of this writing, about 1,000 Americans are still in Afghanistan. Biden has pledged to leave none behind. If anyone remains stranded, Biden's unfulfilled promise may haunt his presidency for the rest of the term, while providing propaganda fodder for terrorists.

No top-level administration firings appear imminent. A high-profile housecleaning ordered by Biden would amount to a profound admission of error that Republicans would eagerly exploit in next year's midterms and in the 2024 presidential election. For now, the White House remains focused on evacuating Americans and the Afghan interpreters, aid workers, and soldiers who helped the U.S. in the war effort. Rather than firing people in the near term, the administration is preparing to bring in more staff to help resettle the Afghans who've fled the country, a person familiar with the planning told me.

Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan is one that a large majority of Americans favor, and have for years. It's something he's long wanted to do. In 2009, he spoke privately to Barack Obama about the then-president's plans to temporarily add 30,000 troops to the U.S. forces in Afghanistan. As he walked with Obama from the White House residence into the Oval Office, Biden tried to dissuade the president from a "surge" that proved to be a futile attempt to beat back the Taliban. Warning Obama about the advice coming from the military, Biden said: "If you let them roll you, you'll be their puppy for the next four years," according to a person familiar with the conversation. "Joe, I'd like to see you be president for five minutes to see how you'd do it," this person said was Obama's reply.

"Biden is a stubborn guy," one former Obama-administration foreign-policy official told me, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk more freely. "Sometimes he does not want to hear what he knows he doesn't like ... If the problem here was mostly not hearing what he didn't want to hear and telling everyone to shut up and go away when they told him things he didn't want to hear, that's not the intelligence community's fault."

How Biden went about ending U.S. participation in the Afghanistan war has ignited the biggest foreign-policy scandal in the eight months of his presidency. Any evaluation of who should be held accountable for the humanitarian mess centers on two points, one technical, the other political. Biden has said that the "consensus" advice he received was that Afghanistan would not fall to the Taliban until later this year, meaning he thought the U.S. had time to conduct an orderly evacuation. That rosy projection would have come from America's raft of intelligence agencies, along with military officials who trained the Afghan army and diplomats who supposedly understood the staying power of the U.S.-backed Afghan government. "Whoever was saying that was wrong, tragically wrong," Dick Harpootlian, a longtime Biden political ally and a Democratic South Carolina state senator, told me. "If I know Joe Biden, I know he's going to remember who told him that."

Yet Biden also needed to weigh the risks against his long-held view that the U.S. must finally extricate itself from a pointless war. At bottom, that's a political decision. And to make a smart choice, Biden needed unsparing candor from the senior national security advisers he's assembled, among them Blinken and Sullivan. They share a certain biographical affinity: Both are in the most prominent jobs of their lives because of Biden (each served as his national security adviser while he was vice president). Neither has a power base or constituency independent of Biden. And that may make them more inclined to yield to his predilections. Any White House is prey to this sort of deference.

Brett Bruen, an official in Obama's National Security Council, recalled a meeting in the Situation Room in 2014 involving Russia. Aides had come in prepared to make a recommendation, and "as soon as a number of people saw the president heading in another direction, no one was willing to tell him, 'Sir, I think this is important enough for a closer examination,'" he told me. "The way you get ahead in this team is by validating and amplifying what your principal wants to hear." Leon Panetta, a former White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton and the head of the Pentagon and CIA under Obama, told me: "It's pretty clear that people around [Biden], even though they pointed out the problems, just knew that he was very intent on moving as quickly as we could. So, how do you deal with that? From my experience, it's really important to have advisers who are willing to look the president in the eye and say, 'You're making a mistake. There's a better way to do this.'"

A president can, of course, grow in the job by applying hard lessons from past failures. Following the botched attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro in the Bay of Pigs invasion, John F. Kennedy ousted his CIA director, Allen Dulles. "Under a parliamentary system of government, it is I who would be leaving office," Kennedy told him. "But under our system, it is you who must go." During the Cuban missile crisis a year later, Kennedy relied on a more informal national-security advisory group, "ExComm," that would on occasion meet without him so that he didn't inhibit anyone from speaking their mind.

In time, Biden will doubtlessly find someone to punish. Too much has gone wrong to leave voters with the impression that there wasn't any accountability. But demoting or disempowering or reassigning someone immediately only obscures the uncomfortable reality that mistakes in Afghanistan spanned four presidencies, resulting in lives needlessly lost and taxpayer money inexcusably wasted. During a speech earlier this month, Biden said, "The buck stops with me." This was after he blamed a fractious Afghan government and the Afghan military for refusing to fight. (That last point sparked outrage among national-security experts who pointed to the high Afghan death toll. "He said they didn't fight for their country. Yes, they did fight for their country! They lost 70,000 soldiers," Lisa Curtis, a senior director for South and Central Asia in Donald Trump's National Security Council, told me.)

"Could this have been handled better? For sure, and we should look at what went wrong and why it went wrong and who made what decisions," Ivo Daalder, who was the U.S. ambassador to NATO during Obama's first term, told me. That said, he added, "the reason the government collapsed is not because of Jake Sullivan or Lloyd Austin. The reason the government collapsed is because we have fooled ourselves into believing that our support for the Afghan government was sufficient and it would ultimately stand on its own feet. And it didn't. There's been 20 years of failed policy."

Biden, speaking at the White House late this afternoon, vowed to find and punish the attackers. "To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this: We will not forgive. We will not forget."

"America will not be intimidated," he added. What is notable about this statement is that Biden was essentially promising the American people that he would hunt down terrorists in Afghanistan, no matter what the price. This wouldn't be the first time Americans have heard this promise from their president.

[Karl Henning]

This is a mirror of what we said about trump. He made it for four years though and only barely lost. I'll say this, if the nominees is Kamala then I agree. She's a loser.

I guess if you want to feed the troll, that's your affair.

[JBS]

Apart from media bloviating there are just the very bad images of the scenes at the airport and now the hard numbers of dead, too.

Those are not going to go away and there will be no second term.

The people who don't want this to go away are the people who need a scapegoat for their own culpability.  That goes for both the political and media establishments.

If Biden is not re-elected, it will be because of other things.  A sizeable majority of Americans wanted out of Afghanistan.

[Herman]

The people who don't want this to go away are the people who need a scapegoat for their own culpability.  That goes for both the political and media establishments.

If Biden is not re-elected, it will be because of other things.  A sizeable majority of Americans wanted out of Afghanistan.

Yes, of course people wanted out, but this was done in a bad way.

Also, I don't think this has made the USA "the laughing stock of the world," as someone said above.

I don't see anyone laughing.

I don't doubt chances are a GOP president would have done it in a bad way, too, apart from the fact that a GOP president had the terrible idea to go there in the first place. But this happened under a D president, and the campaign ads write themselves from this week onwards.

[Spotted Horses]

Yes, of course people wanted out, but this was done in a bad way.

Also, I don't think this has made the USA "the laughing stock of the world," as someone said above.

I don't see anyone laughing.

I don't doubt chances are a GOP president would have done it in a bad way, too, apart from the fact that a GOP president had the terrible idea to go there in the first place. But this happened under a D president, and the campaign ads write themselves from this week onwards.

The good way would be what? To leave without attempting to evacuate our collaborators at risk in Afghanistan?

Withdrawal is always a dangerous operation. During the previous administration there was an average of ~15 U.S. deaths per year in Afghanistan. There were many more deaths during the periods of intense operations. It would be an understatement to say that the loss of life is saddening, but it is not out of line with losses sustained on a yearly basis in maintaining the status quo.

Predicting how this event will bear on Joe Biden's political prospects at this point strikes me as pointless and crass.

[Karl Henning]

ISIS-K, the group behind the Kabul airport attack, sees both Taliban and the U.S. as enemies

[Karl Henning]

Judge Parker ordered Team Kraken to "reimburse the State Defendants and the City [of Detroit] for the reasonable fees and costs incurred to defend this action." What this means is that the cadre of government lawyers who toiled on the taxpayer dime to defend this garbage lawsuit can tally up the many hundreds of hours they spent on this action and send Lin Wood and Sidney Powell the bill. Given how spectacularly awful the plaintiffs' lawyers were—"claim[ing] violations of Michigan election law without a thorough understanding of what the law requires"—the judge went even further and imposed "mandatory continuing legal education" on them. In other words, they're off to remedial law school.

Killing the Kraken: Federal Judge Sanctions Trump's Big Lie Lawyers

[Florestan]

I don't think so. It's called losing. Did you want a plan as good as the one we've had for the last twenty years? If that one didn't work, what makes you think anything else would? This is what I expect when The American military withdraws. Chaos. What did you want to fill the vacuum?

You say that it couldn't have been done any other way, let alone better. I beg to differ. Greatly, actually. But both your statement and mine are unfalsifiable, so we'll never know. Let's just agree to disagree.

[JBS]

Yes but in Trump's case it depended on impeachment, which failed. In Biden's case it depends on his obviously, visibly deteriorated and deteriorating mental state. I mean, for God's sake, the guy is senile. The sooner this reality will be acknowledged and taken into account, the better for the USA.

Please stop. People went around for 4 years claiming Trump is senile and now the Right wants to pull the same stunt on Biden.
Neither man shows any sign of being senile.

[Karl Henning]

After a few drinks, he just cannot stop, you see.

[BasilValentine]

The hand wringing here is nauseating. Defeat? Laughing stock? You people just don't get it. The objective of the war was achieved: Politicians got to pretend they were doing something decisive about global terrorism, 2.3 trillion dollars went into the pockets of defense contractors and private security firms (with a cut of that going into the reelection campaigns of warmongers), and corrupt Afghan officials' overseas bank accounts in return for their assistance in helping to justify the sham as an effort in nation building. What did you think this was about?

[SimonNZ]

Apart from media bloviating there are just the very bad images of the scenes at the airport and now the hard numbers of dead, too.

Those are not going to go away and there will be no second term.

You're not taking into account who the R candidate might be and what covid-denying, vaccine-skeptic, constituent-killing and endangering policies they've now tied to. To say nothing of their probable Q-endorsing, Trump-asskissing, insurrection-supporting history.

It's too early to say how the Afghanistan pullout story will be viewed, but I suspect that apart from Fox et al the widely accepted narrative will be the "it was always going to messy" which we are already hearing.

But, yes, its so frustratingly asymmetrical: the Rs have been an absolute clown show in every way for five years straight, but the pullout is messy so that, the punditry has it, obscures everything in the voters mind. Just as Trump on the campaign trail in 2016 can call people enemies and traitors and all manner of other insults literally dozens of times every single day, but Hillary missteping with deplorables once was, supposedly,  the whole ball game.

[SimonNZ]

Please stop. People went around for 4 years claiming Trump is senile and now the Right wants to pull the same stunt on Biden.
Neither man shows any sign of being senile.

I'd say both are past their prime and both give word-salad interviews.

But I'd take Biden's moral compass as leadership over Trump's complete lack any day, obviously.


Perhaps its just the coverage I get out my way, but I keep wondering why Harris isn't more visible, and they're not getting people used to seeing her as part of top-level strategy.

[VonStupp]

People don't write letters, or pay bills, or collect and sign paperwork through the mail.  They don't request and order through catalogs.  People don't even use netflix dvds anymore.

By don't, do you mean do? Last I heard, Netflix had somewhere around 2 million, DVD-only, US subscribers still, and continue to make a profit from it. Far from the days of milk and honey, I am sure, but quite impressive considering.

Me, I love my Hammacher Schlemmer catalog too!

[JBS]

I'd say both are past their prime and both give word-salad interviews.

But I'd take Biden's moral compass as leadership over Trump's complete lack any day, obviously.


Perhaps its just the coverage I get out my way, but I keep wondering why Harris isn't more visible, and they're not getting people used to seeing her as part of top-level strategy.

Part of it is the ugly truth that the more involved she is, the louder the "he senile's so she's doing his job" chant becomes.

Another ugly truth is the racism and misogyny she's subject to, which can lead to equal counter-distortions in support of her.

[SimonNZ]

Part of it is the ugly truth that the more involved she is, the louder the "he senile's so she's doing his job" chant becomes.

Another ugly truth is the racism and misogyny she's subject to, which can lead to equal counter-distortions in support of her.

I can see how they might fear that. But on the other hand they should have expected that when she was chosen as running mate and it seems like bad short term thinking rather than beginning to elevate her now as someone who has shown her worth "in the room".

[Herman]

But, yes, its so frustratingly asymmetrical: the Rs have been an absolute clown show in every way for five years straight, but the pullout is messy so that, the punditry has it, obscures everything in the voters mind.

this asymmetry is what it's about. The GOP appeal to people primal feelings, like, "Biden got Americans killed, it's another Saigon" and there's just no way you reason your way our of that.

[Karl Henning]

this asymmetry is what it's about. The GOP appeal to people primal feelings, like, "Biden got Americans killed, it's another Saigon" and there's just no way you reason your way our of that.

There's no reasoning the MAGAzoids out of anything.

[arpeggio]

The hand wringing here is nauseating. Defeat? Laughing stock? You people just don't get it. The objective of the war was achieved: Politicians got to pretend they were doing something decisive about global terrorism, 2.3 trillion dollars went into the pockets of defense contractors and private security firms (with a cut of that going into the reelection campaigns of warmongers), and corrupt Afghan officials' overseas bank accounts in return for their assistance in helping to justify the sham as an effort in nation building. What did you think this was about?

Give me a break man.  Most of us here are not as ill informed as apparently you think we are.

[arpeggio]

The good way would be what? To leave without attempting to evacuate our collaborators at risk in Afghanistan?

Withdrawal is always a dangerous operation. During the previous administration there was an average of ~15 U.S. deaths per year in Afghanistan. There were many more deaths during the periods of intense operations. It would be an understatement to say that the loss of life is saddening, but it is not out of line with losses sustained on a yearly basis in maintaining the status quo.

Predicting how this event will bear on Joe Biden's political prospects at this point strikes me as pointless and crass.

I agree.

In three thousand years of military history I can not think of a single war, campaign or battle were the loser was not screwed.  There was a historian of TV that made the point the Napoleon lost more men when he retreated from Moscow that he did taking it.