Biden White House under assault on Afghanistan drawdown

President Joe Biden long touted his foreign policy credentials as a core asset he’d bring to the Oval Office. And once he was in the White House, he proudly proclaimed “America is back” on the world stage.

Instead, chaos and confusion dominated his first major foreign policy decision — the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

Far from bringing a return to stability as he promised, it has led to the sort of imagery he insisted would not take place on his watch: scenes of American diplomats fleeing the U.S. embassy by helicopter as the Taliban tightened their noose around Kabul.

All day Sunday the White House fended off a firestorm of criticism — rushing Secretary of State Antony Blinken onto Sunday cable shows to attempt damage control. Then Blinken, Defense Sec. Lloyd Austin and Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley briefed Hill lawmakers, some of whom railed against what they called a lack of preparedness by the Biden administration. Overwhelmed by pleas from those attempting to exit the country safely and the need for expedited visas, the Pentagon announced an emergency deployment of additional troops, soon to total 6,000 on the ground in Afghanistan.

Heart-rending images of desperate Afghans trying to board flights out of the airport in Kabul flooded social media, while Taliban militants broadcast live from the presidential palace amid reports of al Qaeda and other extremist prisoners breaking loose from government facilities.

“The White House was clearly blindsided and unprepared for the speed of Afghanistan’s collapse. Even Biden allies will not try to claim this as a job well done or say this is what they had planned. After all, nobody would have planned for a last-minute evacuation that was just thrown together out of necessity,” said Brian Klaas, a political analyst and expert on democracies who now teaches at University College London.

For months, Biden’s advisers had been downplaying the likely political impact of the U.S. exit, pointing to polls showing that voters were tired of war and just wanted to bring the troops home. And they noted that it was Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, who approved the peace agreement with the Taliban in his final year in office.



It’s the execution of the withdrawal policy, however, that’s under assault — a particular failure given it happened under a president who since the presidential primary boasted he stood out from the pack because of his four decades serving on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and his time on the global stage as vice president.

“Whether the policy was right or wrong,” Klaas said, “the execution was clearly botched.”


The end of America’s longest war was supposed to happen quietly. But the chaotic American departure from Kabul suggests that Biden will forever own what is undoubtedly a humiliating coda for a doomed nation-building effort that began shortly after 9/11 and will end shortly before the 20-year anniversary of that tragedy.

Perhaps the most damning moment for Biden were his own words at a July 8 news conference, when he explicitly declared there would be no parallels between the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the fall of Saigon, when military helicopters took part in an urgent evacuation in the final days of the Vietnam War.

“There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy,” Biden said then. “It is not at all comparable.” LINK