President Joe Biden was nowhere to be seen in the first 48 hours after his administration’s record was tainted, probably permanently, by the catastrophic intelligence failure that handed victory to the Taliban in Afghanistan. His decision to break away from his Camp David vacation and finally speak to the nation Monday afternoon was a disappointing attempt at damage repair for a withdrawal debacle that has bruised the national ego and shredded America’s image abroad.
Biden will have trouble living down the embarrassment of having confidently declared barely six weeks ago that the U.S. withdrawal wouldn’t produce another Saigon — scenes of Vietnam chaos as military helicopters lifted people off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in 1975. Biden also asserted on July 8 — again with complete confidence — that the 300,000-strong Afghan military would be able to hold its own and fend off a Taliban attempt to seize major cities. The chances of a Taliban takeover, he said, was “highly unlikely.”
Well, he couldn’t have been more wrong, and he deserves to be reminded of it again and again by his Republican critics. Biden’s credibility was shot long before he finally addressed the nation on Monday. He tried to blame others, even to the point of outright misstating the facts when it came to peace talks between the Afghan government and Taliban. The Taliban, from the beginning, refused to talk with the government. Biden chose to honor an agreement the Trump administration reached with the Taliban knowing it was deeply flawed and completely excluded the Kabul government from the process — ensuring that government’s eventual defeat.
On Biden’s watch, what should have been an honorable and organized transition of military control to an elected Afghan government instead turned into a wholesale, humiliating retreat. After 20 years of war, 2,354 U.S. military deaths and more than $1 trillion in U.S. taxpayer expenditures, Biden has handed control of Afghanistan to a ragtag Taliban army that made its name in the 1990s by hanging accused adulterers and female rape victims, banning women from the workplace, forbidding girls to attend school, and punishing anyone caught listening to music. This on top of having hosted the al-Qaida terrorists responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
This is Biden’s Jimmy Carter moment — an open display of American weakness and incompetence. For Carter, it was the humiliating takeover by Iranian militants of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the ensuing 444-day hostage crisis. On Carter’s watch, an attempt by U.S. special operations forces to rescue the hostages ended in even more embarrassment and failure. Once Carter left, Americans didn’t allow another Democrat to occupy the Oval Office for the following 12 years.
And despite Biden’s claims to the contrary, Afghan troops did, in fact, stand up and fight as long as they knew U.S. troops and air support had their backs. Their performance was far from stellar, but it was improving markedly.
President Donald Trump bizarrely declared that Taliban leaders were committed to peace. He opened talks with them while excluding the Afghan government from participation. The signal was unmistakable: Afghanistan was the Taliban’s for the taking.
Just because Biden inherited the badly flawed Trump peace deal didn’t mean he had to honor it, especially by imposing an unrealistic and artificial timetable of completing the withdrawal by the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. It didn’t have to end this way, but Biden stubbornly insisted on it. Which is why he now owns this humiliating defeat.