Thinking About Things: Afghanistan, Mr. Biden, and Coming Full Circle

John DeQ Briggs

Homage to A Government, Philip Larkin, 1964

Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home
For lack of money, and it is all right.
Places they guarded, or kept orderly,
Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly
We want the money for ourselves at home
Instead of working. And this is all right.

It’s hard to say who wanted it to happen,
But now it’s been decided nobody minds.
The places are a long way off, not here,
Which is all right, and from what we hear
The soldiers there only made trouble happen.
Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it’s a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.

My wife and I flew over Afghanistan in 2019 on the way back to London from a three week stay in Vietnam as a sort of pilgrimage to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of my own departure from Vietnam after my second tour of duty with the Navy. We seemed to be flying over Afghanistan for hours, but it never looked much different than this picture taken from the airplane window. 

As we looked down at this extraordinary landscape, we took note of the fact that no central authority could ever hope to govern this vast and inhospitable region, where thousands of towns and villages appeared to be cut off from any infrastructure connecting them to any other town, village or city. It was, frankly, an extraordinary and memorable sight, even from 40,000 feet. 

1. Memories of Joe Biden from his Past Life

I am beyond old enough to remember Mr. Biden’s run for the presidency in 1987. I traveled by train regularly from Washington to New York, Philadelphia, and Wilmington. I also used to bump into Mr. Biden from time to time on the train between Washington and Wilmington. Our interactions were limited to pleasantries. But based on these, and much more on his public persona, I always perceived him as an amiable but relatively harmless dunce. To be sure, he demonstrated in his 1987 run for the presidency a strange combination of fecklessness and bold (what we might today call Trumpian) dishonesty.

During that campaign, Mr. Biden made headlines for serial lying about his academic credentials. He claimed to have been a top law graduate from Syracuse law school when in fact he graduated 76^th in a class of 85; he claimed to have gone to law school on a full scholarship, but this was untrue. Video and story here. He also was accused of and admitted to plagiarism in law school, but defended it on the grounds it was not “malevolent,” see this September, 1987 New York Times story written by E.J. Dionne Jr. The final straw for Mr. Biden’s 1987 presidential campaign was his word for word and gesture for gesture plagiarism of chunks of a famous speech given in Parliament by Neil Kinnock, then a British Labour Party politician. He plagiarized others as well, to the annoyance of Robert Kennedy’s speechwriter, who thought Biden “counterfeit.” Story here; film here.

But much as Presidents Nixon and Clinton redeemed, or at least normalized, themselves in various ways, so it appeared that Joe Biden had matured and grown up and out of his old self. His rehabilitation was facilitated by the fact that everyone felt pity for him because of the death of his first wife and daughter (car accident in 1972 just after Mr. Biden had won election to the Senate). Decades later, by the fall of 2020, he appeared to be nearly the only sensible person in a crowded Democratic field composed mostly of relatively hard left progressives. He was amiable; he was “uncle Joe;” “Joe sixpack;” he was full of hair sniffing empathy, especially for womankind.  

While perhaps a boob, he was hard to hate.  And given that the country was suffering from a high level of “Trump fatigue,” and Trump was easy to hate, it was hardly a shock (other than perhaps to Mr. Trump) that Mr. Biden won the presidency. The campaign was marked by several Trump blunders and by what at the time appeared to be the political genius of Mr. Biden’s campaign managers:  keeping him out of sight in the basement of his Wilmington residence, while leaving the stage completely to President Trump, who used his months  alone on stage to demonstrate to independent and suburban voters why they so disliked him. Suddenly, however, and for the last many weeks, Mr. Biden has been in full view and we have seen the raw Biden unsheathed. To my eyes, it has not been a pretty sight at all. But I am getting ahead of myself.

2. Afghanistan: Why Were We There, What Did We Do? 

We all need to step back from the last few weeks for a few paragraphs. First of all, it has emerged as a conventional view in this country that we needed to get out of Afghanistan with all deliberate speed because it was an “endless” or “forever”  “war”  and therefore “bad.”  The slogan was all one needed to know to reach a conclusion. Very Madison Avenue; very American.  Yet, mercifully, one of the things I learned from my parents, and my formal and informal education, was never to accept the premise of a statement or a policy unblinkingly. Indeed, as I have grown older, the more widespread or conventional a view is, the more I tend to wonder whether it is likely to be the product of “the lemming effect” of peer pressure or something like that. So, I want to make a point that has been made by very few in recent weeks or months, the point being that the military action in Afghanistan began, indeed continued for a long time, perhaps even right up until the end, as the most legitimate foreign military action in American history since at least World War II. If you scoff, consider the facts below. 

In response to the attacks of 20 years ago today: (1)  the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives voted 534-1 in favor of military action in Afghanistan to remove Al Qaeda from Afghanistan as a terrorist threat to the United States, which meant removing their protectors the Taliban, who had taken over Afghanistan militarily in 1996;  (2) NATO invoked Article 5 – the common defense clause – for the first and only time in NATO’s 75 year history; (3) the United Nations passed a Resolution  authorizing the United States to respond “by any means necessary,” UN-speak meaning the United States was authorized to utilize  such military force as it might find appropriate to deal with the Taliban; (4) and fifty one (51) countries (!)  sent troops to Afghanistan, with a combined 130,000 troops at the deployment’s  peak.

NATO’s combat mission ended in 2014, but thousands of coalition troops remained to help train and advise Afghan security forces. Many (about 7,000 as best as I can learn) of those allied troops were there until last month. They shed much blood and spent much treasure. And Mr. Biden never consulted with them (or the Afghan government or Afghan Army) before deciding to bug out of Afghanistan in the manner he chose.  The Prime Minister of one such country, Australia, happened to be in Washington on 9/11 and observed the smoke rising from the Pentagon.  He immediately flew back to Canberra, telling his cabinet to meet him at planeside side so that they could promptly declare war.  Other countries acted similarly.  President Bush enjoyed a favorable rating of an astonishing 89% in the polls. 

The NATO combat mission ended in 2014 in the US troop decline began then and continued such that by the end of the Obama administration troop levels were reduced to 8400. Mr. Obama had planned to remove all troops by the end of his second term, but due to security concerns on the ground, he chose not to do that. See here.   In August, 2017, President Trump warned against a “hasty withdrawal”, stating that conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, would guide American strategy. Mr. Trump, in fact raised the number of troops to some 14,000 later that year and into 2018. Then, in the fall of 2019, Mr. Trump’s representative negotiating with the Taliban announced that under a deal reached “in principle” with the Taliban, the first 5000 US troops would withdraw within 135 days of the agreement becoming final. See here According to CENTCOM, the US had reduced its Afghan troop numbers to 8,600 by June 2020, “…in accordance with the February 2020 Taliban peace deal.”  On November 17, 2020, acting US Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller announced further troop withdrawals, leaving 2,500 troops across both Afghanistan and Iraq, down from the previous amount of 4,500 and 3,000, respectively. Wikipedia entry here. 

So, when Mr. Biden took office, we had about 2500 troops in Afghanistan. American allies still had 7000 troops there according to Sam Harris’ Making Sense podcast ## 258-59. There had been few if any US casualties from and after January 1, 2020, and only a modest number of casualties after 2015 according to Pentagon data cited below.  Some 66,000 Afghan soldiers died, as did more than 47,000 Afghan civilians. Taliban and other opposition fighters killed numbered about 52,000. According to the Defense Department, total American military combat deaths in Afghanistan for the twenty years from inception to the end of 2014 were 1847. From January 1, 2015, to date only 20 were killed in action according to a DoD Release dated August 31, 2021. Non hostile deaths (illness, accidents and the like) were 505 and 88 during these two time frames according to the same release. In addition, 1145 allied troops died in Afghanistan. Details here. To put this in some pertinent perspective, there were 10,120 deaths by murder in Chicago during the same 20-year time period. One might readily conclude that a year of combat duty in Afghanistan would be safer than spending a year in Chicago. Sadly, the street war in Chicago really is a “forever war.”  

A different pertinent point of comparison is that we have had more than 28,500 military troops stationed in South Korea for roughly 65 years and we have had some 55,000 troops stationed in Japan and more than 65,000 troops stationed in Europe, in each case for 75 years. It is not unreasonable to believe that the maintenance of a small force in Afghanistan did more to protect the security of Americans in this country than did the maintenance of nearly 150,000 American troops in Europe and Asia. Our allies, especially in Europe tend to believe that their own security was enhanced by the presence of the small military presence in Afghanistan. Biden Refusal to Acknowledge Error Dismays Supporters and Allies.  That presence had little or nothing to do with combat, but it had almost everything to do with training, intelligence gathering through human sources as well as drones. In moderately well-managed circumstances, it would have been possible to leave Afghanistan without our own conduct and words triggering the immediate collapse of the Army and the government – facts that Mr. Biden and his administration now turn upside down in arguing that the very chaos they caused proves the wisdom of their actions. But I get ahead of myself again.  

One reason offered by Mr. Biden and his administration for their ill thought through departure was that, having spent 20 years, considerable American treasure (approximately $1 trillion over 20 years), and having lost American blood on foreign soil, it was time to end this “forever war,” given the supposed choice of either leaving or committing “tens of thousands of American men and women” to combat in a strange and foreign land.  But as became so common this past summer, Mr. Biden’s spoke with forked tongue, in false hyperbole, and offered phony choices. The $1 trillion number is a mere fraction of what Mr. Biden and his progressive colleagues in Congress and in his administration are trying to commit to spend in a single bit of pending legislation. To digress for a moment, it should be sobering, but apparently it is not, that in 2000 US federal debt amounted to 56.5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Today, US federal debt represents 125.73% of GDP. At today’s rock-bottom interest rates, the interest on our roughly $29 trillion of federal debt is $405 billion per year. See US Debt Clock.  

Mr. Biden is throwing around his $1 trillion number, spent over 20 years, as if it is shockingly large when actually it is pretty modest considering the absence of significant terrorist activity on US soil since 9/11. If and when Al Qaeda or other terrorist jihadist groups are able to operate freely in Afghanistan (and there is no reason to believe they will not) and if they again do great damage on American soil (one hopes not, but given the absence of border security in this country it seems a distinct possibility), then Mr. Biden will be remembered as the man who surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban and increased American vulnerability to terrorist jihadist attack. In such an event, he will be remembered as far worse even than Neville Chamberlain. And why did he do this? He did this to score a political photo-Op on 9/11 so that he could heroically celebrate the 20^th anniversary of 9/11 and the “extraordinarily successful” departure of American troops from Afghanistan. Even today, on the 20^th anniversary of 9/11, he has the effrontery to continue congratulating himself on the “extraordinary success” of his grotesquely bungled disengagement from Afghanistan. 

I cannot go further on this topic without generally aligning myself with the comment by former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair to the effect that Mr. Biden’s withdrawal was driven “in obedience to an imbecilic slogan about ending ‘the forever wars’ ”.  BBC footage and story. I also cannot go further without making clear my view that Mr. Trump, no less than Mr. Biden, was making ill-considered decisions about withdrawal from Afghanistan based on short-term domestic political considerations and not based on the long-term interests of the United States. The same was true of Mr. Obama to some extent, except that he did not go forward with his preferred course of action (withdrawal of troops) given the situation on the ground in Afghanistan in 2014 and even in in 2016. 

I believe the concept of “forever wars” has its roots in the Iraq fiasco far more so than in Afghanistan and also in the slogan-driven system we call politics in this country. The idea of “forever war” is the antithesis of “forever peace” and hence not possible to support.  And on the flip side of that, of course, only a hard-bitten soul, probably a fascist, would be against “forever peace.”  But as one of the editors of this publication wrote last week: “… endless war can end when the endless jihad does.”  A country does not stop defending itself unless it is simply too tired, too lacking in will, too defeated to soldier on. The United States seems to have reached that place, well captured in the Philip Larkin poem at the top of this piece. 

Where was I? Yes, from start to finish Iraq was built on a founding lie about WMD, compounded by monumental ineptitude. Afghanistan way completely different. Afghanistan was successful in its initial mission to remove the Taliban, and hence deny to Al Qaeda and other jihadists free rein in Afghanistan.  The mission crept to something different thereafter and had a “nation building” feature to it, but it was hardly a total failure on that account. That mission, which I shall refer to as the middle mission, resulted in a workable and relatively stable Afghan government, democratically elected. There was to be sure much corruption, but it was as much American as Afghan. This middle mission resulted in the creation (mostly by the Afghans themselves) of a viable economy and educational system that in the past generation have pulled the country out of illiteracy to a very large extent and brought women (and men too, one must remember) from the seventh century into the 21^st century (at least temporarily). It was hardly a failure compared to, say, Iraq, Vietnam, or Cuba. 

It was because of this “success” of the middle mission, imperfect but not trivial, that the mission changed during Mr. Obama’s second term to move altogether away from nation building, and to move also away from being in any true sense “a war.” As in Korea, and also Germany for some decades, we were in a somewhat stable standoff – a stalemate with the Taliban.  Beginning in 2015 or thereabouts, our mission was fairly understood to keep the Taliban and other terrorists at bay. The American presence was to support the Afghan army with air support, intelligence, war material, and “over the horizon” drone and satellite capability.  Neither the media nor many consumers of media output took the trouble to pay very much attention to Afghanistan though.

And, for reasons that were never altogether understandable, the polling on Afghanistan suggested that most Americans thought we should simply leave. I do not know what precise question was asked in such polls, but I doubt that it had much context, and likely it had no context. If people were asked the question in a certain way, they would no doubt state their opposition to maintaining troops in Europe, Korea, or Japan. Doubtless people were not asked whether we should surrender to the Taliban and give Afghanistan back to jihadists as a safe haven for them to terrorize America and the West. 

Notably, until Mr. Trump was elected there was no constituency in this country for bugging out of Afghanistan immediately or precipitously. It was the far-right isolationism (Trump’s America First view) that gave voice to the notion that indiscriminate retreat from foreign affairs was desirable. Unexpectedly, perhaps, this piece of Trumpism was embraced by the far left, with its evolving view that The United States is and has been from inception an Evil Empire and has no business imposing its views about anything on any other countries.  This Trumpian urge to retreat from foreign affairs was not just Afghanistan, it was Europe and NATO as well.  It was politically convenient, but otherwise beyond astonishing, that Mr. Biden should claim that he had “no choice” but to follow through on Mr. Trump’s arrangements with the Taliban. This was dishonest first because Mr. Trump felt no obligation to do anything but undermine and undercut every other agreement or executive act of Mr. Trump to the extent he could. It is even more dishonest because in essentially the same breath he claimed to his European allies that “America was back,” whereas those allies all said and felt that his chaotic bugout from Afghanistan was a monumental betrayal and possibly the death knell of NATO.  One suspects that many in Europe yearn for the “good old days” of Mr. Trump. 

It also strikes me as remarkable that both the isolationists of the right (Trump supporters) and the isolationists of the left (Progressives, now including Biden) seem to be paying no attention to the fact that the Pakistani government has proved itself at once fearful of, yet hospitable to,  the Taliban. Pakistan, of course, is not Afghanistan. And one thing that makes it different is that the Pakistani government controls 165 nuclear warheads. The American presence in Afghanistan, tiny as the footprint was, and as modest as was the annual cost in recent years, included Bagram Air Base, one of the most strategically well-located airfields in central Asia and one now denied to American airplanes. As a practical matter, this means that United States will have virtually no intelligence capability on the ground or in the air over Afghanistan or near Pakistan. It is difficult to imagine anything good coming from all that. 

Indeed, under more astute leadership both on the military side and in the White House, it would be hard to imagine an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan that did not include continued rights to utilize Bagram Air Base for some non-trivial period of time. Instead, Mr. Biden made the decision to sneak away from Bagram, against the advice of his military commanders, and to abandon Bagram at 3:00 AM in the morning over the July 4 holiday weekend. This was done without advising the Afghan military or our NATO allies that it was happening. Talk about pulling the rug out from under our friends. And the US simply left 5000 terrorist prisoners at the facility as it abandoned the place.     As the Associated Press reported on July 2, weeks before Mr. Biden and his administration were completely overwhelmed by their own acts:

Afghanistan’s district administrator for Bagram told The Associated Press that the U.S. departure happened overnight and without coordination with local officials. As a result, dozens of looters stormed through the unprotected gates. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid called Friday’s departure from Bagram “a positive step” and told NBC News that “for now” the Taliban does not plan on seizing the sprawling airbase, which is located some 40 miles north of Kabul.

The people of Afghanistan have been engaged in a civil war since 1978. This Civil War began even before the Soviet invasion of the 1980s. When the Soviets finally departed in 1992, Kabul and the Afghanistan provinces fell into the hands of various tribal Warlords – Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek, Hazura, Turkmen and many others. Four years later, in 1996, Kabul and Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, most of whom are Pashtun. In 2001, Kabul and most of the country fell to the Americans. Now, in 2021, Mr. Biden and his administration chose to surrender the country to the very group of people we ousted in 2001, preferring the uncertainty of the future to the stalemate with terrorist jihadists of the present. Mr. Biden and his administration have traded a faux forever war for a very real forever jihad. Mr. Biden has made the perfect the enemy of the reasonably OK. Having run on the antiwar slogan, “Build Back Better” one of Mr. Biden’s very first acts Was to Build the Taliban Back Better.  What could possibly go Wrong? 

All of this said, I am persuadable that it was necessary or desirable to leave Afghanistan at some point in the near or medium term. Maybe we even should have left after the December 2001 failure to capture Bin Laden at Tora Bora, where he had been cornered but slipped away (largely due to military blundering, but that is a whole nother story, well summarized by Maureen Dowd more than a decade ago. Blunder on the Mountain).  The accompanying photo is of Afghan enemies of Al Qaeda observing the Bombardment of Tora Bora. 

The polling notwithstanding, the stated reasons for our immediate and recklessly chaotic departure (whether by Mr. Trump’s administration or Mr. Biden’s administration) do not at this moment strike me as strategically sound or even rational. Rather, in each case, the precipitous decision to abandon Afghanistan seems to have been made solely for domestic political reasons. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden seemed perfectly willing to sacrifice national interests to potential personal political gain. History will judge on this point, and it may take time before that historical judgment can be rendered. Or it might be swift. If terrorist jihadists find Afghanistan to be a suitable platform for attacks on the United States and Europe and we will know that timing of the decision to leave was as catastrophically incompetent as the method of departure.  And it is now to that event, and the multiple layers of bad judgment surrounding it, that I now turn. 

3. The Timing and Manner of the American Departure

One seemingly positive outcome from the 2020 presidential election was that we would return to executive competence in the Presidency. There would be adults in the White House who could engage foreign policy matters with a steady hand. While Mr. Biden had no legislative achievements to point to over his four decades of legislative experience, nor did leave behind evidence of management incompetence.  It is true that former defense secretary Robert Gates opined publicly, and in his memoirs, that “I think Mr. Biden has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” but nobody had ever seriously questioned his management competence in the same way that, for example, Mr. Trump’s management competence was questioned nearly every day.  In hindsight, it seems that Mr. Biden never actually had any management experience, which would explain the absence of demonstrated incompetence in that area.

And from his inauguration in late January through roughly the end of June of this year 2021, Mr. Biden did not demonstrate utter management incompetence.  While he transmogrified from a centrist Democrat to a progressive Democrat during this five-month period, most people I know felt that at his core he was just being influenced by the political situation on Capitol Hill.  But the notion of being transformative seem to grow in his mind as time went on and seems to have given him the delusion that if he played his progressive cards right, he could be recognized by the media, indeed history, as the second coming of FDR. This delusion seemed to give him a wholly unwarranted level of confidence in his own judgment about many things, including Afghanistan. 

Anyway, as I come at last to the events of July and August of this year, I can hardly bear to think about them, much less write about them.  Vocabulary sometimes seems inadequate to communicate the shame, the disgust, the horror, the embarrassment I feel about President Biden and his military and civilian advisors for their total mismanagement of the withdrawal.  In most parliamentary systems, our Secretary of State and our head of the Joint Chiefs would have resigned by now, along with the President’s National Security Advisor.  But without doubt we can look forward soon enough to some interesting finger-pointing books.  Few Presidents can get away with blaming the military, the state department, and the intelligence services for their own essentially political choices.  There will be retribution in due course via leaks, books and otherwise.  A book is a ready-made bestseller for Bob Woodward too, if he still has good sources.   Few reputations will emerge unscathed.   

One must, I suppose, begin with Mr. Biden’s July 8 press conference the full text of which is here.  The speech, and the responses at the press conference, were laced with false premises, false choices, and a level of blind faith in his own judgement that has not since wavered, and I do not mean that as a compliment. 

Our military commanders advised me that once I made the decision to end the war, we needed to move swiftly to conduct the main elements of the drawdown.  And in this context, speed is safety. Speed was chaos and death to many. 

In our meeting, I also assured [Afghan President] Ghani that U.S. support for the people of Afghanistan will endure.  We will continue to provide civilian and humanitarian assistance, including speaking out for the rights of women and girls.  Virtue signaling falsehood.

I intend to maintain our diplomatic presence in Afghanistan. Fat chance.

We’re also going to continue to make sure that we take on the Afghan nationals who work side-by-side with U.S. forces, including interpreters and translators — since we’re no longer going to have military there after this; we’re not going to need them and they have no jobs — who are also going to be vital to our efforts so they — and they’ve been very vital — and so their families are not exposed to danger as well. Our message to those women and men is clear: There is a home for you in the United States if you so choose, and we will stand with you just as you stood with us. Would that that had turned out to be true. 

But for those who have argued that we should stay just six more months or just one more year, I ask them to consider the lessons of recent history. In 2011, the NATO Allies and partners agreed that we would end our combat mission in 2014.  In 2014, some argued, “One more year.”  So we kept fighting, and we kept taking casualties.  In 2015, the same.  And on and on. He has airbrushed out of the storyline everything after January 2015.  Post 2015, there were almost no deaths of US troops, especially compared to Chicago.  

 Mr. President, thank you.  But we have talked to your own top general in Afghanistan, General Scott Miller.  He told ABC News the conditions are so concerning at this point that it could result in a civil war.  So, if Kabul falls to the Taliban, what will the United States do about it?

THE PRESIDENT:  Look, you’ve said two things — one, that if it could result in a civil war — that’s different than the Taliban succeeding, number one.  Number two, the question of what will be done is going to be implicated — is going to implicate the entire region as well.  There’s a number of countries who have a grave concern about what’s going to happen in Afghanistan relative to their security. 

The question is: How much of a threat to the United States of America and to our allies is whatever results in terms of a government or an agreement?  That’s when that judgement will be made. The answer to the question stated was “nothing.” 

Q    Mr. President, some Vietnamese veterans see echoes of their experience in this withdrawal in Afghanistan.  Do you see any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam, with some people feeling —

THE PRESIDENT:  None whatsoever.  Zero.  What you had is — you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our embassy — six, if I’m not mistaken. 

The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability.  There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan.  It is not at all comparable.  No doubt Mr. Biden would like a mulligan on that answer. 

From and after that press conference, we saw a President Biden cornered, querulous, combative pig-headed, defensive, mean, and in many dimensions just plain dis-likable.  He morphed away from amiable Uncle Joe to  Mean Joe.   He had run in some large part on his “likability,” an asset that he squandered almost completely during the summer of 2021.  He also squandered his credibility.  He seems still to be in denial about the possible undermining or destruction of NATO and the concomitant (and quite sudden) distrust of the United States by virtually all other nations.  The reaction from Germany was disbelief and betrayal.  As Angela Merkel put it: “we all made the wrong assessment [of Biden].”  This type of comment is ubiquitous among European leaders either privately or publicly.  How Biden Broke NATO  and Daily Mail (UK)

As for Mr. Biden’s well-known and politically marketable empathy, he has demonstrated an uncharacteristic un-empathetic heartlessness in his public utterances about stranded Afghans (and even Americans), who have been left in Afghanistan to “shelter in place,” and odd choice of words for citizens stranded in a deadly totalitarian environment.  He also demonstrated a similarly puzzling tone-deaf heartlessness in his trip to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to greet the bodies of the 13 young American men killed by a suicide bomber just days before the final pullout.  He seemed bored by the whole event and looked his watch almost constantly.  And when confronted by parents of dead young Marines, Mr. Biden tried to show his empathy by talking about the fact that his son Beau had been in the military in Iraq (Beau was a lawyer of the military not a combatant), and then wrongly implying that it was his son’s military service as a lawyer that caused the brain tumor that killed him at age 47 or so.  

The families did not take well to the way Mr. Biden showed no empathy and tried to turn the event into a focus of his own loss of a son in totally different circumstances.  The parents of the young Marines were justly offended by the lack of respect or empathy demonstrated by Mr. Biden. Some lashed out at Mr. Biden after their meetings with him.  Wash Post Story here  and National Review story here.   He did not rise to the occasion; rather he simply sank. The mother of one of the young Marines killed that the Kabul airport told a radio station: “I never thought in a million years my son would die from nothing, for nothing, because that feckless, dementia-written piece of crap decided he wanted a photo up on September 11^th.”  This is of a piece with his failure to rise to the occasion to take account of the immiseration of Afghan women, girls, and Afghan citizens in general.  So much for a foreign policy centered on human rights and supporting allies as full partners.  We can thus add hypocrisy on a Trumpian scale to Mr. Biden’s character. 

Rarely have words such as bungling, fiasco, catastrophe, reckless, and betrayal been tossed around with such regularity by the media to characterize an American President and his administration.  And not just the right of center media, but the left of center media as well. The cover story for The Economist was Bidens Debacle. The Week magazine ran with A Shameful Ending; the Washington Examiner went with Biden Runs Away, subtitle: Self-delusion and Humiliation in Afghanistan.  The mockery to which the nation was subjected by the Taliban, China Russia, Iran and others was unprecedented. The faux Iwo Jima flag raising, re-enacted by Taliban Soldiers wearing American uniforms left behind was one of the tamer symbols of humiliation.  

Mr. Biden and his administration are widely accused of a frightening, even grotesque, lack of preparation and foresight, not to mention their total failure to consult with our allies who had 7000 of their own military personnel on the ground, plus many more civilians. 

To me, it beggars belief that our President should lie behind such a shocking betrayal of our obligations, and, as importantly, our own American interests.  It is almost impossible to imagine a greater indication of American decline or a greater gift to our enemies, who must now know to a moral certainty that they can always call our bluff because we are simply no longer a competent superpower.  If China invades Taiwan in the next year or two or three, our frantic and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan will surely be one of the reasons they felt they could.  As Sam Harris put it in a recent “Making Sense” podcast: 

The way we left is astonishing; it will hurt us.  Who will trust us?  If you don’t think we want our friends of trust us and our enemies to fear us, what planet have you been living on?

It was surreal to hear our President say that the deadly and chaotic withdrawal was an “extraordinary achievement.”  It certainly was “extraordinary” but not any form of “achievement.”  To the extent there were problems (such as being forced to turn over to the hated Taliban 100% of all responsibility for the security of Americans and their Afghan allies during the last days of the bugout – not to mention bequeathing to them either $20 billion in military hardware or $60 billion depending on the source du jour-  they were blamed on President Trump for having initiated the negotiations with the Taliban that lead to the initial agreement to withdraw by May 31; they were blamed on the intelligence community; they were blamed on the Afghan government; and they were blamed on the failure of the Afghan Army to live up to its potential even after they had been unexpectedly and precipitously abandoned by the United States and left without incoming intelligence, drone support, or any other kind of support. 

I fear, no I see, that the wheels have finally come off for this country. They have been wobbling for a few years now, beginning at least during the Trump administration, and likley before that.  The social order has no cohesion.  Government has no cohesion.  Institutions have no cohesion.  We are living in the space where there is a complete distrust of nearly all institutions: the government, the media, companies, schools, universities, courts, everything.  It has become depressingly evident that we have become a divided country and we cannot address common threats to our society or even our civilization.  Just as bad, in a way, is that nobody in this country knows what it means to be “American” anymore.  Foreigners all want to come here, but we as a people seem have lost any idea of who we are, why we are here, and what if anything we stand for.   So, whether it is terrorist jihadists, Covid-19, social upheaval, climate change or any other number of internal or external existential threats, we as a people have chosen disunity over unity, chaos over order, individual rights over broad social rights and so on and so on. 

Journalists have been writing about the reckoning to come for  the US foreign policy elites and surely this is deserved no less for the state department personnel and the military then for the President. News outlets  from the New York Post to the BBC have recently  published stories about the President’s bending of reality and the truth (NYPost: Biden Lies Piling Up;  BBC: Fact Checking Biden on Afghanistan.  An especially thoughtful podcast is Sam Harris’ “Making Sense” # 260 from two days ago entitled The Second Plane, a 30 minute remembrance of 9/11 and also a rumination on the impact of 9/11 and the bungled withdrawal on U.S, foreign policy in the coming years.  

The polls, which seem quite consistently to be off in a center left direction, have shown a drop of more than 10 points in the President’s approval in the last few weeks – from 55% to 45% as of this writing. What surprises, and in a way depresses me, is that his ratings are still so high. I expected them to be deservedly far lower. I must be out of touch with the mainstream. But I sense a general social comfort on all ends of the political spectrum, and maybe even in the middle too, that we should all right retreating from foreign and world affairs so that we can repair our roads and bridges, get the lead out of our water pipes, attend to tearing down historical statues and symbols,  provide a better life (or at least money) to the poor and uneducated, police each other’s societal behavior on social media, and make sure that people use the correct pronouns for each other.   In such an isolationist and self-centered world, we can all lie in our own warm bathtub, pour a glass of nice wine, put on our headphones, and tune into our social silo of choice, hoping at least for a time the world will not require us to pay attention to large or micro aggressions outside our borders that might annoy us. And if we have no life lessons to bequeath to our children, well, as Philip Larkin wrote, “…we can leave them money.”