President Biden's biggest defeat: Afghanistan war ends amid chaos and broken promises
Fairly or not, it's Joe Biden's defeat.
Instead of savoring credit for ending America's longest war, the president faced withering criticism Sunday for the inept way the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was executed – just the sort of chaotic exit that he had promised weeks ago would never happen.
Left at risk were U.S. diplomats, some lifted from the Kabul Embassy by helicopter in a reminder of the desperate evacuation in Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Afghans who had served as translators for U.S. troops and helpers for Western journalists reported bracing for the worst as the Taliban moved to take over the capital.
As Afghan governmental forces collapsed with stunning speed, Americans were left to wonder what had been achieved through two decades of warfare, thousands of casualties and the investment of billions of dollars.
Taliban takes Kabul: After two decades and billions spent, Afghan government collapses
The war was launched by President George W. Bush and supported by overwhelming majorities of Americans in the wake of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Afghanistan had sheltered the terrorists led by Osama bin Laden, whose death at the hands of U.S. special operations forces 10 years later was a moment of American celebration. Both President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump wanted to end U.S. participation in the conflict; neither managed to deliver that.
Biden made the decisions that set the stage for a messy American retreat and an astonishing Afghan military reversal. Despite U.S. training and superior military hardware, Afghan troops offered little resistance to Taliban forces.
Now the crucial developments in Afghanistan will be largely out of Washington's control: Will Afghanistan once again became a haven for terrorists? Will any of the gains made in the past 20 years, especially in the lives of women and girls, survive the Taliban's takeover?
More: Many fear Taliban will again end Afghan human rights, support terrorism
The defeat was the most devastating for Biden since he moved into the Oval Office. The dramatic and disturbing footage from 7,000 miles away instantly overshadowed last week's victory when the Senate passed the foundation of his domestic agenda, a $1 trillion infrastructure bill and a $3.5 trillion budget blueprint.
In a series of TV interviews Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken argued that the Biden administration had inherited a mess not of its making. He noted that Trump had set a May deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. forces under an agreement that the Taliban would renounce its ties to al-Qaida, the terrorist group behind the 9/11 attacks.
"We inherited a deadline, negotiated by the previous administration," Blinken said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "And the idea that we could've maintained the status quo beyond May 1st if the president had decided to stay, I think, is a fiction." More time wouldn't have made a difference, he said.
What was harder for the White House to defend was the disconnect between Biden's assurances of an orderly transition and the havoc that followed. During the campaign, he emphasized the depth of his credentials on foreign policy, as a former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and eight years as vice president.
"The likelihood there's going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely," Biden said last month. He declared, "There's going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy … of the United States in Afghanistan."
The "hasty rush to the exit" that he promised wouldn't happen was precisely what Americans saw in the scenes from Kabul, raising questions about the quality of the intelligence the United States had gathered and the contingency plans it had made.
Rep. Liz Cheney, R- Wyo., whose father, Dick, was vice president when the war began, said the Trump administration bears some of the blame. "They walked down this path of legitimizing the Taliban, of perpetuating this fantasy, telling the American people that the Taliban were a partner for peace," she said on ABC's "This Week."
Biden holds responsibility as well, she said, for what is happening and what will happen. "We've now created a situation where, as we get to the 20th anniversary of 9/11, we are surrendering Afghanistan to the terrorist organization that housed al-Qaida."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Biden's biggest defeat is Afghanistan withdrawal, Kabul's collapse
