Afghanistan: Will Biden suffer lasting political damage?
Up to now, President Biden has been impervious to Republican attacks, said Rich Lowry in Politico.com, but he just “shredded his own credibility.” Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan has filled American TV screens with “unforgettable and horrifying images,” and his defense of the fiasco has been riddled with “half-truths and blatant deceptions.” On July 8, the president insisted that the Taliban could not defeat the Afghan army, and that the departure of U.S. troops would not prompt scenes like the fall of Saigon. “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people lifted off the roof of an embassy,” Biden told Americans. Now that his “wishful thinking” has been proved wrong, he’s claimed in a series of defensive speeches that his administration had plans to “respond to every contingency.” What “malarkey.” Americans were promised that Biden would return “adults-in-the-room judgment” to the White House, said Peter Baker in The New York Times. But even many Democrats are openly questioning how the withdrawal has been handled, while gleeful Republicans are seizing on the opening to portray Biden as a senile second coming of Jimmy Carter.
Biden’s mishandling of the withdrawal is a scandal, but “the bigger one is the war that he is ending,” said Eric Levitz in NYMag.com. The 20-year-old Afghanistan conflict cost more than $2 trillion and the lives of an estimated 241,000 Americans, Afghans, and U.S. allies—all to have the Taliban ultimately regain control. Many of the pillars of the political and media establishment now excoriating Biden “have every incentive to divert our attention” from their role in cheerleading us into a nation-building boondoggle. And if Biden had heeded his military advisers’ calls to keep 2,500 soldiers there, the enraged Taliban would have considered it a breach of its 2020 treaty with the Trump administration and launched a major offensive, forcing Biden to send more troops back in. The crisis has cost Biden public support—for now, said Harry Enten in CNN.com. Though 62 percent of respondents to an Associated Press poll still said the Afghanistan War had not been worth fighting, Biden’s handling of the withdrawal dropped his average public approval ratings below 50 percent for the first time. Still, “the American public often has a short memory” about foreign-policy misadventures, and in a year, voters “may ultimately not care.”
What a sad indictment of the country that would be, said Noah Rothman in Commentary.org. It would mean Americans have grown so “hopelessly jaded and callous” that they’re indifferent to the fate of Afghan civilians, the thousands of allies we will leave behind, the terror threats that could bloom in a Taliban-controlled country, and the waning of America’s global influence. The Biden White House is “betting that America is finished as a global superpower and that you will welcome our decline.”
Biden’s popularity will continue to sag if his decision making remains “rooted in conflict avoidance,” said Perry Bacon Jr. in The Washington Post. Many of his administration’s missteps, such as his initial hesitance to accept “more than a token number” of Afghan refugees or to impose vaccine mandates, suggest an aversion to triggering “culture war” issues. Biden prefers to project an image of competence and smiley-faced bipartisanship. But with Republicans committed to obstruction, “partisan and cultural conflicts” are inevitable. And on most issues, including mask and vaccination mandates, Biden has popular opinion behind him. For the good of the country and his presidency, Biden should drop the pretense that bipartisan agreement is possible, and “fight on more polarized issues instead of trying to dodge them.”