What Biden Gets Right About the Politics of Afghanistan

What Biden Gets Right About the Politics of Afghanistan

The president has been shrewd to frame the withdrawal as a choice between staying and leaving. Voters have short memories, and the images of Kabul chaos will recede.

By Jonathan Bernstein

September 1, 2021, 10:21 PM GMT+9

President Joe Biden gave a speech on Tuesday following the final withdrawals from Afghanistan that got the most important thing right and lots of less important things … well, not quite right.

What he got right, as he has been doing for the last three weeks, was to frame the events in terms of a binary choice: staying or leaving. That put him on the popular side of a question — polling still suggests that a solid majority of Americans still supports ending the conflict. 

It also put him on the right side of the media’s and the public’s attention span. The odds are strong that with the U.S. mission in Afghanistan over, and no more dramatic pictures coming from the Kabul airport, news organizations will rapidly shift to other stories, in part because most news consumers will be more interested in events at home than events abroad that don’t directly involve Americans. It’s possible that Taliban atrocities or Afghanistan-based terrorist attacks could change that, but the odds are that “we got out” will soon defeat “but it went badly” in the realm of public opinion.

To be sure, Congress should hold hearings on the endgame during both the Biden and Donald Trump presidencies. Journalists should keep explaining all the mistakes that at least five presidents, and a dozen Congresses, and for that matter plenty of journalists made over the years. I hope they do. It might be useful. But it’s unlikely to grab the public’s interest, or to be a factor in future elections. 

Biden put it bluntly: “We faced one of two choices: follow the agreement of the previous administration and extend it to have more time for people to get out, or send in thousands more troops and escalate the war. To those asking for a third decade of war in Afghanistan, I ask: What is the vital national interest?”

That part of Biden’s speech went well. And the necessary appreciation of the job done by U.S. troops was fine. There were other good bits.

But as a piece of theater, the speech was in dire need of an edit and another rehearsal. For one thing, Biden spent much of the first half of the speech arguing back against various criticisms of how the withdrawal was orchestrated. As one who is fairly sympathetic to a lot of Biden’s case, I still found the exercise defensive and, if not inappropriate, not helpful to him or to listeners. The truth is that presidents don’t win arguments with their critics that way. Mostly, they don’t win those arguments at all, given that few critics of any president and his or her policies are apt to be open-minded about it. Sure, it’s a fine idea to send members of the administration out to make key points, and yes, some members of the media might be swayed. But save Biden for the stuff that he and only he can do, such as trying to frame the question the way he wants it.

For those listening carefully, Biden’s defense really didn’t answer some of the obvious questions. Why exactly are some U.S. citizens still in Afghanistan? Of the impressive number of Afghans evacuated, how many are in the special visa category that includes translators and other U.S. allies? How many were not able to be rescued? 

It didn’t help, either, that Biden used what I think of as his shouting mode for the first half of the speech. During a few appearances over the last three weeks, some observers thought he seemed tired and worn out. On Tuesday, he did what he had done during the Democratic debates back in 2019 when similar criticisms had been voiced, which was to turn loud and, I suppose, forceful. To me, it just makes him seem defensive. Halfway through, he dropped that tone and shifted back to his normal speech-giving style, which is fine; he’s no Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama, both of whom were masters of delivering written speeches, but he’s perfectly OK.

During that first section, former presidential speechwriter and White House rhetoric maven James Fallows made a good comparison: “If Harry Truman had existed in the TV age, this is the kind of speech he would have given.” What he meant was that Biden was using plain language to tell truths that some politicians would duck. What I’d add, however, is that Truman — an excellent president — was unpopular during most of his time in office, and his plain language and truth-telling were often seen as petulant score-settling and only became popular in retrospect during Richard Nixon’s presidency, when the White House was serving up a very different style of talk. 

Biden has done what Truman didn’t do in Korea, what Nixon did only partially in Vietnam and only after tremendous losses, and what George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump didn’t do in Afghanistan. I suspect that what he did is eventually going to be seen as more important than how he did it. And it will certainly be more important than Tuesday’s not very memorable speech.

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