(Official Washington Examiner editorial, Aug. 30): In Afghanistan three years ago today, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris completed what was arguably the most ignominious capitulation in U.S. history. Harris still defends her administration’s handling of the debacle, but a review of its particulars is in order. The details inspire no confidence in Harris’s judgment on matters diplomatic and military.
Harris once boasted she was the “last person in the room” with Biden when he decided to set a specific date for the withdrawal of all U.S. personnel and was “comfortable” with it. This was to associate herself publicly with the decision and to suggest that she was influential or instrumental in making it happen. Just this week she called it “the courageous and right decision.”
It is as appalling that she should still think so as it is that she should have helped execute such an ignominious debacle.
Former President George W. Bush took his eye off Afghanistan, former President Barack Obama was harmfully irresolute on that war, and former President Donald Trump made what even most of his own supporters at the time described as unwarranted concessions to the brutes of the Taliban. But none of that falls to the awful level of decision-making and incompetence of the current administration.
Biden and Harris had half a year to get things right, but they took the wrong actions at every turn.
Unlike Trump, Biden had access to the final report of the Afghanistan Study Group, an impressively bipartisan and distinguished collection of experts, who two weeks into Biden’s term urged that he not set a specific date for the mission’s end and that the U.S. keep a “long-term … counterterrorism force” there. The group said the mission was accomplishing important objectives, and it recommended a continuing force of 5,000 U.S. military personnel. It warned that withdrawal would probably lead to outright Taliban supremacy in the country, with awful repercussions. Biden ignored that and also ignored intelligence warnings of looming catastrophe. Despite his claims to the contrary, his military leaders testified almost immediately after the withdrawal that they had directly advised Biden against it….. [The full editorial is at this link.]
