This President Is An Adult. Are We?

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Unlike the toddler he replaced. Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post writes about Biden’s grown up approach to Afghanistan and how so many Americans are behaving like children:

President Biden on Thursday mournfully delivered information to the country that was disagreeable to many Americans: There is no way to withdraw from a futile war without messiness. The expectation that there would be no misery or casualties was a fantasy.

A case in point is the issue of Afghan refugees. “I know of no conflict, as a student of history — no conflict where, when a war was ending, one side was able to guarantee that everyone that wanted to be extracted from that country would get out,” Biden said solemnly. His historical memory is accurate.

The United States has transported roughly 120,000 Afghans and American citizens to safety at great human cost. That miraculous feat is a tribute to the humanity and bravery of the U.S. military and civilian personnel and volunteers. But any hope of depopulating a war-torn country, and ending the suffering there (including the dismal future for millions of women and girls) after our defeat is not grounded in reality. It belongs with the magical thinking that the United States could create a nation state in Afghanistan.

A week ago, many in the media were lecturing the administration for abandoning Afghans. Now, after we evacuated about 120,000 people at the cost of 13 American lives, reporters wanted to know why we were keeping troops at the airport. In response to such a question on Thursday, Biden said: “There are additional American citizens, there are additional green-card holders, there are additional personnel of our allies, there are additional SIV cardholders, there are additional Afghans that have helped us, and there are additional groups of individuals that — who have contacted us from women’s groups, to NGOs, and others, who have expressly indicated they want to get out.”) He was criticized for “abandoning” Afghans; when we stay to rescue them he gets faulted for risking American lives.

The insistence that there must have been a painless way — or, by gosh, a less painless way! — to lose a 20-year war, rescue all imperiled Afghans and avoid any more casualties is a fable too many insist on cultivating.

We should have kept control of Bagram airfield! (Bagram is 30 miles or so from Kabul. The U.S. military would have had to protect any caravan of refugees transported there, while also defending a very large facility.)

We should have pulled out everyone in April! (Would not the Afghan government have crumbled then?)

We should have known the army would collapse! (Apparently 20 years of training and effort to forge a national identity was a waste of time.)

Just leave a few thousand U.S. troops there! (And attacks akin to what happened on Thursday would magically cease? One should think long and hard before increasing the number of Gold Star parents.)

Biden seemed sincerely interested in confronting the media’s favored storylines. As reporters scoffed at the notion that the United States trusts the Taliban to provide security, Biden explained, “No one trusts them; we’re just counting on their self-interest to continue to generate their activities. And it’s in their self-interest that we leave when we said and that we get as many people out as we can.” He added, “And like I said, even in the midst of everything that happened today, over 7,000 people have gotten out; over 5,000 Americans overall.”

He might have saved his breath. Reporters will ask the same question over and over again, as if to suggest that they would have a more sophisticated approach to dealing with the Taliban than those on the ground.

The conviction that a president should have foreseen everything and escaped the consequences of a disastrous war is reflective of the mind-set of highly educated professionals, who are convinced all problems can be addressed if only we find someone wise enough to see around all the corners. There is no way to defuse the certitude of Biden’s critics, or to dispel their self-serving rationale for leaving troops there indefinitely. Biden, like all presidents, must do what he thinks is right and leave the verdict to voters — and to history.

. . . The worst of the recent errors may have been believing the Afghan government and military could stand on their own, at least for a year. That, in turn, set the pace of visa processing and evacuations and the timing of a final withdrawal. The paths not taken (rushing to the exit sooner, leaving troops there indefinitely) could have had dire consequences as well, but these are abstract — while the suffering we watch is concrete and gut-wrenching.

We need some sober reflection on the folly of overeager interventionism. We need to come to terms with the delusional feedback loop between civilian and military leaders. Instead we have a media and political culture that are not serious or attentive enough to grasp that dilemmas 20 years in the making have no good answer, just less terrible ones. Everything is reduced to a partisan question. (Is Biden in crisis? Is this a boost for Republicans?) The media, it seems, does not know how to cover a tragedy without viewing it through the lens of horse-race politics. It is so much easier to pronounce the exit a “disaster” than to consider if one’s advocacy over 20 years contributed to the groupthink that sent young men and women to die. Confronted with 13 dead Americans, the press is eager to demonstrate Biden missed the obvious, safe course. What that is, they do not explain.

This week’s loss of life — both American and Afghan — is heartbreaking. With a mainstream media obsessed with stoking partisan squabbling, and Americans refusing to process the consequences of their own choices, it does make one pessimistic about self-government.

Unquote.

David Rothkopf knocks down criticisms one by one at USA Today.

Numbers

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New Jersey (where I live) has had the most Covid cases and most deaths per capita of any state, mainly because it hit northern NJ and New York City hardest early on, when nobody had experience treating it and there were no vaccines.

12,200 cases per 100,000 residents

302 deaths per 100,000

Mississippi, home to lots of Republicans and poor people, is now in 2nd place with 278 deaths per capita, even though few people got it there early on. (Paul Krugman)

Far from New Jersey, the total evacuated by US/coalition partners since August 14: 111,900

When the effort began, US officials estimated there were 6,000 Americans and up to 65,000 Afghan allies they wanted to get out. (John Harwood/CNN)

The Former Guy’s Agreement

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Because his predecessor made a deal with the Taliban, Biden had a choice: either leave or escalate. Here’s some context necessary for understanding what’s happening in Afghanistan (The Washington Post):

With the withdrawal from Afghanistan turning deadly for U.S. troops, President Biden faces new criticism for a situation that he argues presents him few options.

The deal that President D___ T___ cut last year with the Taliban forced Biden to choose between a withdrawal now or an escalation of the war, Biden said Thursday, as he addressed the nation after at least 13 members of the U.S. military were killed in Kabul.

He choose to withdraw.

“I had only one alternative,” he said, “to send thousands more troops back into Afghanistan to fight a war that we had already won, relative to the reason why we went in the first place.”

When the deal was cut in Doha, Qatar, in February 2020, it wasn’t treated as huge news, because the war itself wasn’t big news. So many people don’t actually know its contents.

Here is what’s in it and how it has been perceived.

WHY T____ CUT THE DEAL

When T___ came into office, he was pretty transparent — he just wanted out of Afghanistan. “T___ had no real sense of what was at stake in the war or why to stay,” writes Georgetown professor Paul Miller in a digestible history of the 20-year war.

So T___ took a swing at something his predecessors hadn’t: a full-bore effort to strike a deal with the Taliban. It took nine rounds of talks over 18 months. At one point, T___ secretly invited the Taliban to the presidential retreat at Camp David on the eve of the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But he shut that down . . . after an American service member was killed and there was bipartisan backlash over the invitation.

Talks continued in Doha, and in February 2020, T___ announced that there was a deal. The basic contours: The United States was to get out of Afghanistan in 14 months and, in exchange, the Taliban agreed not to let Afghanistan become a haven for terrorists and to stop attacking U.S. service members.

The Taliban also agreed to start peace talks with the Afghan government and consider a cease-fire with the government. (The Taliban had been killing Afghan forces throughout this, attempting to use the violence as leverage in negotiations, U.S. intelligence officials believed.)

The deal laid out an explicit timetable for the United States and NATO to pull out their forces: In the first 100 days or so, they would reduce troops from 14,000 to 8,600 and leave five military bases. Over the next nine months, they would vacate all the rest. “The United States, its allies, and the Coalition will complete withdrawal of all remaining forces from Afghanistan within the remaining nine and a half (9.5) months,” the deal reads. “The United States, its allies, and the Coalition will withdraw all their forces from remaining bases.”

The United States would release 5,000 Taliban prisoners; the Taliban would release 1,000 of its prisoners.

The Taliban’s end of the deal asked a lot from the group — too much to be realistic, critics said. In addition to making sure nowhere in the country harbored a terrorist cell, the Taliban agreed to be responsible for any individual who might want to attack the United States from Afghanistan, including new immigrants to the country.

The Taliban “will send a clear message that those who pose a threat to the security of the United States and its allies have no place in Afghanistan,” the deal read. And the Taliban agreed to “prevent any group or individual in Afghanistan from threatening the security of the United States and its allies, and will prevent them from recruiting, training, and fundraising and will not host them in accordance with the commitments in this agreement.”

This deal required taking the Taliban’s promises on faith.

“I really believe the Taliban wants to do something to show that we’re not all wasting time,” T____ said as he announced the agreement. He added as an aside: “If bad things happen, we’ll go back with a force like no one’s ever seen [of course, whatever he’ll do will always be the greatest ever].

THE DEAL WAS A SWEET ONE FOR THE TALIBAN, CRITICS [i.e. neutral observers] SAY

One gaping problem, say scholars (including some from the T____ administration): The peace agreement came with no enforcement mechanism for the Taliban to keep its word.

The Taliban basically had to sign a pledge saying it wouldn’t harbor terrorists. . . . 

The biggest tangible commitment from the Taliban looked like this: For seven days before the deal was signed, its leaders significantly reduced their attacks on Afghan forces to show they were capable of controlling the group across the country. But the deal didn’t require that the Taliban stop its attacks against Afghan security forces.

. . . “T____ all but assured the future course of events would reflect the Taliban’s interests far more than the United States,” Miller writes. H.R. McMaster, T____’s second national security adviser, has recently called it “a surrender agreement with the Taliban.” Another member of T____’s National Security Council said it was “a very weak agreement.”

As The Fix’s Aaron Blake notes, former T____ officials are suddenly and conspicuously scrambling to distance themselves from that deal.

CRACKS IN THE DEAL EMERGE ALMOST IMMEDIATELY

A few months after the agreement was signed, there was plenty of evidence that the Taliban wasn’t as sincere as it appeared about peace. The United Nations said it had evidence that the Taliban and al-Qaeda still had ties. U.S. intelligence warned that al-Qaeda was “integrated” into the Taliban. The Taliban launched dozens of attacks in Afghanistan, ramping up its violence.

“The Taliban views the negotiations as a necessary step to ensure the removal of U.S. and other foreign troops under the U.S.-Taliban agreement, but the Taliban likely does not perceive that it has any obligation to make substantive concessions or compromises,” a U.S. inspector general report read.

It was all enough that when Biden came into office, U.S. officials questioned whether the Taliban was breaking its side of the deal.

BUT T____ CHOSE TO CONTINUE TAKING U.S. TROOPS HOME

And he had bipartisan support for it.

It’s important to remember that by the time T____ came into office, the public debate about whether to stay in Afghanistan was largely over. Most Americans were done with the war. Even the military realized it couldn’t effect much more change on the current course. “The only way forward was going to be a political agreement,” Mark T. Esper, T____’s former defense secretary, said recently. “Not a military solution.”

To a number of those who were paying attention, the whole deal felt like a naked attempt to just get out of Afghanistan. It was a campaign promise of T____’s to be the president who finally ended America’s longest war. It would be something no other president had been able to accomplish.

Before the peace talks really got going, T____ had already started withdrawing thousands of troops, and he fired his defense secretary, Esper, after he wrote a memo disagreeing. (Esper later said that T____’s withdrawing too many troops too soon contributed to what we see now in Afghanistan.)

BIDEN CRITICIZES THE DEAL BUT HEWS TO IT

When Biden took over, there were just 3,500 U.S. troops left in the country (from a high of 100,000 during the Obama years). He pushed back the date of the planned withdrawal from May 1 to four months later, but he kept the deal intact. U.S. troops would be out of Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

“It’s time to end America’s longest war,” he said.

The Taliban didn’t even wait for the Americans to completely leave before it took over the country in a matter of days. As the world watched Kabul fall, Biden has defended his decision not to stay and fight by saying T____’s deal required him to either maintain the withdrawal or escalate fighting.

“When I became president, I faced a choice — follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our forces and our allies’ forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict,” he said in a statement.

On Thursday, he credited the deal for the fact that the Taliban hadn’t attacked Americans during the withdrawal. “The commitment was made by President T____: I will be out May 1st. In the meantime, you agree not to attack any Americans. That is the deal. That’s why no American was attacked.”

. . .  Given that Biden shared the goal to withdraw, it left him little leverage to renegotiate with the Taliban.

For both presidents, the peace deal with the Taliban presented a good opportunity to pursue their own agendas with regard to America’s longest war. And neither has seemed particularly regretful about doing so. . . . [although the former guy and his minions claim he would have carried out the evacuation perfectly, just like he dealt with COVID-19, health insurance,  infrastructure, North Korea and the wall Mexico built].

Afghanistan Update

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From Crooked Media‘s daily political newsletter:

Islamic State terrorists carried out a deadly attack in Kabul in the final days before the U.S.’s scheduled completion of its troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, to the horror of millions around the world, and to the barely concealed glee of Republicans hoping to wield it as a political cudgel against Joe Biden.

>>> Two suicide bombers struck amid dense crowds outside the airport in Kabul on Thursday, killing 13 U.S. servicemembers and wounding 18 more. Dozens of Afghan civilians trying to flee the country were killed, including children, and more than 100 were wounded. The first explosion took place outside Abbey Gate, one of the airport’s main entrances, and the second at the nearby Baron Hotel. ISIS-K, the Islamic State’s Aghan affiliate, has claimed responsibility for the attack, which marked the first U.S. military casualties in Afghanistan since February 2020, when the ceasefire the Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban took effect.

>>> The explosions came after repeated warnings from the Biden administration and other western governments that ISIS could pose a serious threat to the evacuation process. Late on Wednesday, the U.S. embassy in Kabul warned Americans to avoid traveling to the airport and to leave the perimeter immediately, citing security threats. The U.S. Marines at Abbey Gate had been briefed on the possibility of a suicide bomber, but continued to process people for evacuation. “Terrorists took their lives at the very moment these troops were trying to save the lives of others,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement on Thursday.

>>> Austin also indicated that the military would continue its evacuation efforts: “We will not be dissuaded from the task at hand.” President Biden echoed that sentiment in an address on Thursday evening, and pledged to retaliate against those responsible for the bombings: “We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.” Biden reiterated that he stands by his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, and took a moment to give Fox News’s Peter Doocy a well-deserved wedgie: “I bear responsibility for, fundamentally, all that’s happened of late. But here’s the deal: You know, I wish you’d one day say these things, you know as well as I do, that the former president made a deal with the Taliban.”

To nobody’s surprise, conservatives have wasted no time in dishonestly painting a foreseen terror attack on foreign soil as an egregious Biden administration goof-up.

>>> As the scope of the tragedy was still becoming clear, Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX)—who tried to overturn the 2020 election—piped up to claim that “Biden has blood on his hands,” and House Republicans dutifully retweeted him on their conference’s official account. Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) have called for Biden’s resignation, based on the very simple premise that Biden has proven himself unfit by withdrawing U.S. troops from a war zone and also by allowing U.S. troops to get hurt in a war zone. Anyway, here’s Hawley back in April revealing August Hawley to be full of shit: “President Biden should withdraw troops in Afghanistan by May 1, as the Trump administration planned, but better late than never.”

>>> The “late” August 31 deadline is fast-approaching, with more attacks still potentially ahead. Several U.S. allies announced over the last day that they were halting evacuation efforts from the Kabul airport, some even before the explosions took place. The State Department said on Thursday that it was in contact with the roughly 1,000 U.S. citizens believed to still be in Afghanistan, and that roughly two-thirds said they were taking steps to leave. (Some could be sticking around by choice.) Another 500 Americans were evacuated in the last 24 hours. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, head of the U.S. Central Command, warned that the danger isn’t over: “We have other active threats against the airfield.”

Thursday’s attack was a heartbreaking preview of the threats and instability that lie ahead for Afghans who aren’t able to leave, but disregard those who frame it as an indictment of the Biden administration’s withdrawal strategy: Biden has repeatedly cited the high risk of terror attacks as a reason to stick to the August deadline, under enormous pressure from the GOP and the press to extend it. The situation could deteriorate further in the next few days, but there are still ways to help Afghan refugees and those still in the country—if you’re able, here’s where you can donate.

The Airport Bombing. He Sums It Up.

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From Charles Pierce of Esquire:

“I Find It Hard to Care About the Domestic Political Fallout of Today’s Bombing in Kabul”

I really thought I’d asked this question for the last time, or at least for the last time for the foreseeable future, but what in the hell are we still doing in Afghanistan? Twelve more American servicemen dead. Fifteen more wounded. “Scores” of Afghan civilians, too, although they apparently don’t rate a precise published body count. From The New York Times:

One Afghan health official said at least 60 people were confirmed dead and at least 140 wounded. Another health official said at least 40 were dead and 120 wounded. Both officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the Taliban told them not to brief the press, they said. The Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, condemned the attack, and said that at least 13 civilians had been killed and 60 wounded. In one part of one hospital alone, a New York Times journalist saw dozens of severely wounded or killed people.There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blasts. But the night before, a senior U.S. official warned of a “specific” and “credible” threat at the airport by an affiliate of the Islamic State, the Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, and Western governments began urging people to leave the area. Even with such a specific warning, military officials said, it would be very difficult to pick out a suicide bomber with a concealed explosive vest in a huge throng of people, like that at the airport.

The courage of the American soldiers and sailors doing this duty is almost beyond comprehension. To screen people headed for the evacuation aircraft properly, they have to get within arms length—to “look them in the eye,” as General Kenneth McKenzie said mournfully in his press briefing Thursday afternoon. It is possible that the last thing that an American soldier will see on earth is the wiring of a suicide vest. For that matter, the courage of the people trying to evacuate is not to be minimized either. They are sitting out there in the open, many of them with their families and their children, old and young. They are risking it all out there in what is essentially an open field of fire. They are not out there out of their own careful choices, many of them. They are out there because there’s no place else to be in that country.

At his briefing McKenzie was asked if he “trusted” the Taliban and if he was sure that the Taliban wasn’t ultimately behind Thursday’s attacks. McKenzie allowed that trust “was not a word” he would necessarily use in this context, but he did mention that the Taliban would like to eliminate the ISIS franchisee—“ISIS-K” as it seems to be known—that allegedly carried out the attacks. At the moment, from what we know, an alliance between the Taliban and ISIS-K seems unlikely. Which means that, by historical precedent, we ought to watch out for the people who are peddling the notion. One of them was retired General H.R. McMaster, who was all over TV mongering endless war on Thursday, accusing Biden of having surrendered to terrorists, and failing to mention that, on his watch, hundreds died in ISIL-sponsored bombings, including 150 people in one shot in 2017 when a truck bomb detonated in front of the German Embassy. Oh, beware of anyone pitching this line. They’ll be mumbling about aluminum tubes and yellowcake from Niger next.

As far as domestic political fallout, I find it hard to care a great deal about it since we all know what’s going to happen. The Republicans are going to barbecue the facts and fillet history to score points out of pure mendacity. The Democrats are going to have just enough ambivalence in their ranks that they won’t be able to respond in kind, and the elite political press will waver between I Told You So and Biden Doomed. The president, I hope, sticks to his guns, not simply because millions of Americans agree with what he’s doing, but also because of those people waiting out at the airport and the troops guarding them. Their courage demands a coherent plan of action, and not some ill-considered blathering from retired brass hats in the peanut gallery. Lord, we seriously need a new national-security establishment.

Unquote.

American casualties have been light recently because the former president made a deal with the Taliban, which included us leaving by March 31 and setting free 5,000 of their fighters. But somebody didn’t agree that we and our associates should be allowed to leave peacefully.

Two comments I left elsewhere:

Even commentators who recognize the insanity of a 20-year war that was destined to be lost say the situation in Kabul is chaotic and the evacuation has been a catastrophic debacle. We’re going through a mainstream media freakout. What would a successful evacuation have looked like? A million Afghans and westerners each given a plane ticket and calmly taking their place in line, while the previous Afghan government remained in power and the Taliban coolly observed from outside Kabul’s city limits? Everyone who thinks evacuating 100,000 people with so little loss of life has been carried out so badly, even with today’s bomb going off, should be required to explain just how they would have done it and why it all would have worked out so well.

A quote from one observer: “This was the 25th terror attack in Afghanistan since the beginning of last year and the first that is getting more than passing mention in the US press. They included an attack on a maternity ward that killed 24 and another attack on a school that killed 90”. Today’s attack was horrendous, but how many Afghan civilians and American soldiers have died while we tried turning the country into a western democracy? How many more would die or be maimed if we stayed? If only we’d made Afghanistan the 51st state, all would have been fine.