Many progressives argue that there was no way the endgame was going to be pretty. The lesson is that we shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Yes, of course. Yes, but … As several senior military people warned Biden in April, setting a date certain for a total withdrawal gave all the power to the Taliban. This was not a pretext for prolonging U.S. involvement indefinitely, as some have
argued. It was smart tactical advice that Biden rejected. And as the Prospect’s Jonathan Guyer reported yesterday, two dozen diplomats in Afghanistan used an emergency back channel to warn Biden in mid-July that there needed to be far more preparation for evacuations. The cable went to Secretary of State Tony Blinken and evidently stopped there. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan never forwarded this to Biden. According to Guyer’s reporting, Sullivan learned about the diplomats’ July dissent cable for the first time when he read about it in The Wall Street Journal on August 19. Obviously, if the U.S. government, in the person of CIA chief Bill Burns no less, can negotiate the terms of U.S.-Taliban relations after the fact, when the U.S. is playing a much weaker hand, we could have done so before a final date was set for a total withdrawal. Biden’s contention at his wobbly Thursday press conference that he was only following a withdrawal policy and timetable set by Donald Trump (!) just doesn’t cut it. Biden has reversed dozens of Trump policies and orders. And he did push back Trump’s deadline from May to August. Let’s not try to whitewash this. It was a screwup of the first order. Just as the right should not be allowed to conflate the bungled pullout with the issue of whether the U.S. should have stayed in Afghanistan at all once the Taliban was routed in 2002, the left should not play the same game in reverse. The exact terms of withdrawal and evacuation should have been negotiated while the U.S. had a lot more bargaining leverage. This is not Monday-morning quarterbacking. Military people, diplomats, and intelligence people on the ground were issuing these warnings months ago. The Republicans will now try to prolong hearings as long as possible, to keep the spotlight on Afghanistan at the expense of Biden’s other impressive achievements. Some heads may have to roll. But at least this will be
over well before the 2022 midterms. OK—Just to cheer up a depressing morning, here are three pieces of good news. In an interview with The New York Times, ostensibly promoting his new book, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer made clear that he has shifted his views and is now open to retiring soon. Whew! According to FiveThirtyEight, the population shifts reported by the census to urban blue strongholds and away from rural red ones will help Democrats offset Republican redistricting. And in California, public opinion is slowly but steadily moving away from voting to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom. Not a great week for Biden. We’ll take good news where we can get it.
