Biden, Afghanistan, and the perils of "doing the right thing"

Biden, Afghanistan, and the perils of "doing the right thing"

You can’t take the politics out of politics

Matthew Yglesias

 Aug 30 

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(SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

As you know if you’ve been reading my posts or tweets on Afghanistan, I think Joe Biden did the right thing by withdrawing U.S. forces from the country. And while I won’t warrant that every single tactical or operational decision made along the way has been flawless (it would be the first undertaking in military history to have that character), I do think the criticism of the operation has been overwhelmingly unfair. But if you’ve been reading this site for a while, you also know that I am not necessarily a big proponent of “doing the right thing” in politics.

The name of the blog comes from Max Weber’s essay “Politics as a Vocation,” which, among other things, counsels the virtues of prudence in political life. And I think the Afghanistan Affair does tend to illustrate the perils of taking a principled stand.

It also illustrates the limits of a related position I’ve often been associated with: popularism, or the idea that it’s smart for politicians to say and do things that poll well. I think popularism is correct, but what we are living through is the reality that the public understanding of events is refracted through the lens of the media.

Joe Biden is very much a politician in the Weberian sense; it’s part of what made him an effective choice for Democrats in 2020 despite some other weaknesses. It’s also part of what’s made him an effective legislative leader despite an objectively narrow base in Congress. Having done the right thing in Afghanistan despite political peril, I’m sure Biden will now congratulate himself on courage. But my suspicion (and I do want to clarify that this is speculation; I do talk to people in the administration but they are not this forthcoming) is that a big part of the real story here is they underestimated the political risks. Leaving Afghanistan polled very well, so it seemed politically safe. The real risk was in the press reaction, which has been hysterical and lacking in perspective.

My hope is that Biden’s numbers will recover over the next 12 months, Democrats will do okay in the midterms, and this whole thing will eventually be remembered as a case of effective presidential leadership. My fear is that they won’t, Democrats will do poorly in the midterms (which is what normally happens), the withdrawal will be politically discredited in favor of hawkish myths, and American foreign policy will end up even more messed up. And that’s the problem with doing the right thing regardless of the consequences — if you lose the political fight, you tend to end up losing the substantive fight over time anyway.

A media-driven polling collapse

Withdrawing from Afghanistan has been the popular position for years. Nonetheless, Biden’s approval rating has been getting hammered by the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And it’s not difficult to see why. Ever since the unexpectedly rapid disintegration of the U.S.-backed Afghan state, the headlines have been full of stories that amount to “Bad Things Happening in Afghanistan.”

Now to be clear about something, as best I can tell these stories are accurate. When I critique the media coverage of Afghanistan, I am not saying that the press is doing fake news.

But what I am saying is that “Bad Things Happening in Afghanistan” is a story you could have run at any time in the past 15 years. For example, did you know there was a suicide bombing at the entrance of Hamid Karzai International Airport on September 8, 2009? Or that four helicopters were destroyed by rocket fire at the airport on July 3, 2014? Or that three Americans and one Afghan were killed by gunfire at the airport late in the evening of January 29, 2015? Or that there was a suicide bombing at the airport entrance on May 17, 2015? Of course you didn’t know any of that, because none of it was covered as major news at the time. But if rocket fire had hit the airport during the evacuation operation, it would have been huge news.

The tragic deaths of American service members during the evacuation were front-page news. But Americans were dying year after year in Afghanistan, and it wasn’t considered a big deal. By the same token, the Taliban had been steadily gaining ground in the country for about 10 straight years and none of that was considered a big deal. I am sure that the Taliban committed a lot of atrocities during that time as they gained territory (the Taliban is bad), but it wasn’t a major story. There were also, throughout this period, huge corruption scandals and massive human rights abuses by America’s allies — but none of that was considered a big story.

And to be clear, it’s not that it wasn’t reported on. The top outlets had very good people covering Afghanistan. But it didn’t get on television, it didn’t make its way into politics-focused outlets like Politico and Axios, and it didn’t go on the front pages. If at any time during the past decade we’d had wall-to-wall “Bad Thing Happened in Afghanistan” coverage, it would have hurt the incumbent a lot. But we didn’t, until suddenly we did.

A surprising media heel turn

I’ve heard from left-of-center journalists working in non-NatSec roles at the country’s biggest papers and television networks express to me some dismay at the tenor the coverage has taken. But beyond dismay, they’ve expressed surprise. They thought that for one reason or another — generational turnover, the influence of social media, decades of war-weariness — that the media had moved beyond the reflexive hawkishness of the Geoge W. Bush era.

I’ve also heard from principled libertarian and right-wing populist types — who support Biden’s approach — that they are surprised the media has manifested so much more hawkish bias than pro-Biden bias. They thought a Republican president might take this level of shit from the press, but that a Democrat would get more sympathetic coverage.

And I’ve got to say that I am pretty surprised too.

This is why my guess is that the White House is also surprised, and did not think this course of action would prove to be as risky as it has. I think they knew any path to departure was bound to be somewhat ugly and would garner them a patch of rough press, but that the volume and one-sidedness of it probably surprised them just as it surprised me and many of the people working inside these media institutions.

I’m not entirely sure what happened, but one theory is that a lot of folks at places like CNN, the NYT, and Politico were uncomfortable with being positioned as part of the anti-Trump forces and have found it kind of liberating and exhilarating to be ripping into a Democrat — especially because they are now doing so in a way that isn’t really pro-Trump.

The big danger for Biden is that while of course Democrats complain when they get bad press, the Democratic Party has not done the spadework over the years to train its base to think of mainstream journalists as their enemies. Bad press coverage hurt Trump and helps explain why his approval rating peaked at such a low level. But it could only hurt him so much because most Republicans don’t care what CNN says. Democrats aren’t like that, and it’s easy to imagine Biden’s numbers being very sensitive to media reaction. In an interesting piece, Jonathan Chait suggests that this asymmetry between a propaganda-addled GOP base and a mainstream media-loving Democratic base means that Republican politicians can get away with just about anything.

I’m not entirely sure that’s correct. My recollection of the immigration reform debates of 2013 and especially 2007 featured Republican Party political leaders torn between a desire to do a deal with Democrats and a belief that conservative media would happily defy George W. Bush or John Boehner over immigration. By contrast, I think a Democratic president doing a big bipartisan deal would generate positive vibes almost regardless of the content of the deal. That’s one reason Biden’s pursuit of the bipartisan immigration framework was smart politics. So I think the asymmetry is more complicated than Chait says, but it is definitely asymmetrical.

Biden didn’t have great alternatives

Most of the criticism of Biden has taken the form of insisting, contrary to the facts, that there was some obvious, much-better course of action that he could have taken. Within this strain of critique are three fallacious ideas, all of which are pretty obviously wrong:

A lot of people insist that somehow holding onto Bagram Air Base would have improved the evacuation, even though Bagram is further from downtown Kabul and it would have been harder to get people out of there.

Others insist that because there were no U.S. casualties during the period of Trump’s truce with the Taliban, that U.S. forces could have just stayed indefinitely and avoided casualties, which is absurd.

Last, there’s a sense that Biden should have done the whole evacuation in May, June, and July before the fall of Kabul. One problem here is the U.S. Embassy did in fact tell American citizens to leave (commercial air travel was available at the time), and there was no way for Biden to force them to do it. The other problem is that evacuating Afghans who were helping the United States would have caused the collapse of the Afghan state. It’s true that it is hard to evacuate people once the Taliban has overrun Kabul. But it was only the collapse of the Afghan state that made the evacuation necessary and prudent.

Now, none of this is to say that Biden had no other options.

One choice, bolder than the one he made, would have been to sell out Ghani more comprehensively and directly negotiate a surrender to the Taliban. That could have allowed for a more orderly withdrawal of American personnel and SIV holders on an agreed-upon schedule, at the end of which we would have turned over the keys to Kabul to the Taliban. Given that the Afghan government was claiming at the time that it would be able to fight the Taliban, it would have been political suicide in my view for Biden to undercut them so directly and actually force them to surrender. But this really would have worked out better for everyone.

The other choice would have been to say “we looked it over, Trump made the wrong call here, the Taliban isn’t upholding their side of the deal, the Afghans can’t hold out for long on their own, and American forces are staying.” You’d probably have had to send in reinforcements and you’d have to deal with some American casualties. But it wouldn’t have been a lot of American forces, and it wouldn’t have been a lot of American casualties either. Before Trump signed his truce with the Taliban, the military was using airstrikes very aggressively to compensate for the small military footprint. This killed lots of Afghan civilians, but the news outlets who’ve become so solicitous of Afghans’ welfare this August weren’t very interested in that.

Going back to that early-Trump approach would not have fixed anything, and it would have earned Biden some criticism (including from me) on the merits. But Afghanistan would not have been a major news story, and there’s little reason to think it would have hurt his numbers. This is the can-kicking logic that led to Obama’s incomplete withdrawal and that governed Trump’s decision-making until he was a lame duck. Biden has explained very eloquently why he didn’t want to do that yet again, but the objective political incentives favored it.

The price to pay

It’s very unlikely that the events of summer 2021 will be specifically on voters’ minds in the 2022 midterms. But the natural forces of the universe usually lead to the president’s party doing poorly. So in a big picture sense, in any story arc where you’re not winning, you are losing. And this is clearly not an arc where Biden is winning. I hope things will turn around, both specifically in terms of how the press looks at this story and more broadly in terms of the narrative around Biden. I hope the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework gets done, and then I hope we get some good stuff out of the reconciliation package. Life goes on.

But my fear is that you only get to take so many political risks in life, and having rolled the dice and lost politically on Afghanistan, it’s now less likely that Biden will challenge the hawkish establishment in other areas like Iran policy that are probably more important.

I don’t feel comfortable making an extremely firm prediction, but that’s my fear at least. If you read Obama’s memoir, it’s pretty clear that he had kind of mixed feelings about some of the national security policies he was pursuing as president. And he was fairly open in his second-term discussions with journalists that there were larger changes to U.S. posture in the world and the balance of threat assessments that he would have ideally liked to make (you can see some of this in my interview with him). But he treaded pretty cautiously because he was trying really hard to prioritize making a nuclear deal with Iran that would stick. And in practice, that came very close to both blowing up in his face (Congress nearly blocked its implementation) and actually working (several of Trump’s senior advisors recommended against tearing it up), but at the end of the day, the progress, though real, was frustratingly ambiguous.

The strong and slow boring of hard boards is just really, really difficult, and I think it makes sense for politicians to be hesitant to run big risks for the sake of doing the right thing.

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