Why so many people find Biden an easy target
The vehemence with which many politicians and media pundits on the left and right have attacked President Biden should not be surprising. Given the chaotic and heart-wrenching scenes in Afghanistan, the commander in chief becomes an obvious target, especially for a press corps desperate to show they do not have a liberal bias.
But “chaotic" does not equal “failed,” and just because our intelligence community blew it big time — again — does not mean the United States has abandoned its Afghan partners. Since Aug. 14, we have evacuated over 37,000 people. The United States has enlisted a slew of allies to help receive refugees. And our allies remain united that they will not recognize nor extend aid to the Taliban until we are satisfied they have not hindered our evacuation and are respecting human rights.
Despite the torrent of angry media coverage, a recent CBS News poll found that 63 percent of Americans still want out of Afghanistan. And while Biden’s approval ratings have dipped (largely due to the covid-19 surge), the decline is less than one might expect. In NBC News’s poll, for example, he has dropped only one point among registered voters — from 51 to 50 percent — since April. So why is the media so determined to convey that Biden’s effort has “failed”?
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Too many reporters adopt the talking points of critics of an administration, even when those critics have an interest to make Biden the fall guy. The media, for example, have parroted the right wing’s deliberate effort to impugn the Biden administration’s motives about “abandoning Afghans” (as it airlifts tens of thousands of them out the country) while ignoring the Trump team’s destruction of the visa system. With a straight face, reporters ask for the judgment of politicians and those in the military who lied for two decades about progress in Afghanistan — as if they and the reporters themselves hadn’t contributed to the rosy, false narrative about the Afghan army’s viability. And the media have run with the notion that the Biden administration broke Afghans’ "morale” rather than focusing on our utter failure to forge a national army, the endemic corruption in their government and Afghan leaders’ selling out to the Taliban for money.
The media almost by definition operates on anecdotes. They see European back-benchers criticizing Biden and squawk about a crisis among our allies. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Fox News’s Chris Wallace on Sunday:
From the get-go, I’ve spent more time with our NATO partners in Brussels, virtually, from before the president made his decision, to when he made his decision, to every time since. We’ve been working very, very closely together. We’ve gotten the G7 together, NATO together, the U.N. Security Council together. We had 113 countries, thanks to our diplomacy, put out a clear understanding of the Taliban’s requirements to let people leave the country. ... I’ve heard, across the board, deep appreciation and thanks from allies and partners for everything that we’ve done to bring our allies and partners out of harm’s way. This has been a remarkable part of the effort. I’ve seen them stand up, step up to help out, including, as I said, agreements with more than two dozen countries now to help out on transit. And beyond that, we’re very focused together on the way forward, including the way forward in Afghanistan, and setting very clear expectations for the Taliban in the days, weeks and months ahead.
Which is the better indicator of our allies’ sentiments: stray comments to the media, or all of the actions Blinken outlined?
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When former officials such as retired Gen. David Petraeus or former defense secretary Leon Panetta tut-tut about the incompetence of the Biden team, remember that these same figures either deliberately spun a false narrative of the Afghan military’s progress or were utterly clueless about the reality on the ground. Of course they want us to belief that a tidier exit from a catastrophic war was possible. That would be so much easier than accepting responsibility for the debacle. (This is akin to Robert McNamara or Gen. William Westmoreland insisting things wouldn’t have turned out so horribly in Vietnam if only the U.S. Embassy in Saigon were evacuated earlier.)
The mainstream media outlets and conservative pundits, military advisers and think tanks who vouched for the war are now hard-pressed to deny that the war was likely futile from the start. Of course they want to maintain the pretense that they were not snookered by the military and the fault lies with Biden’s pullout plan.
"The Afghanistan Papers" author Craig Whitlock explains how presidents misled the public about the war in Afghanistan for nearly two decades. (Joy Yi/The Washington Post)
Meanwhile, former Trump officials such as former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and former vice president Mike Pence — the same folks who treated the Taliban like legitimate negotiating partners, drew U.S. forces down to 2,500, agreed to the release of some 5,000 hardened terrorists and wrecked the special immigrant visa process — want to blame the Biden team. Some claim the deal they negotiated with the Taliban was just a ruse and that they had no intention of actually withdrawing from Afghanistan. (Really, former president Donald Trump was going to insert thousands of troops after bringing the Afghan military to the brink of collapse?) They insist Trump really cared about the Afghans. (You’ll notice the Trump administration suspended SIV application processing after March 2020.)
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The “end forever wars” crowd, including most of the 2020 Democratic presidential field, long to come up with a scenario in which abruptly leaving a war in defeat could be done without chaos and misery. Rather than accept the consequences of defeat, they insist this all could have been handled “better.” How? That they do not say. If Biden had known the intelligence community estimate for how long the Afghan government would last was wildly wrong, they argue, he could have started a mass evacuation sooner. But they cannot explain precisely how an earlier mass evacuation would not have brought down the Afghan government even sooner.
The Biden administration made specific errors, such as believing our intelligence community’s projections for how much time it had to evacuate the country and not beefing up forces on the ground or extending the Aug. 31 deadline further. It also made a choice many object to: deciding to manage whatever chaos ensues from ending a futile war rather than perpetuating the cycle of surges and drawdowns with ongoing U.S. casualties. (At least Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) is consistent in denouncing both the Trump and Biden administrations and advocating a significant troop presence stay indefinitely, even at the risk of casualties.)
Nevertheless, expecting a flawless exit from a quagmire one perpetuated over two decades is unfair — and cowardly. Reporters who have themselves been spun about the war’s progress might be more candid about what the administration is achieving despite the chaos. Ah well, it seems there’s no market for that message during a pile-on.
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