Joe Biden refuses to answer questions about his administration's disastrous pull-out in Afghanistan. He continues to deliver the same basic, pre-packaged speech focusing on the over-arching decision to end our engagement in the country rather than address the incompetent way he executed this policy.
It's the cynical politics of deflection playing out before our very eyes. Biden knows that he, his predecessor and his predecessor's predecessor all entered the Oval Office by campaigning on the promise to end the war. The difference that Biden inherited as compared to when he last worked at 1600 Pennsylvania as Barack Obama's vice president is that, unlike Obama, Donald Trump actually meant it when he made the promise.
So when Biden apologists insist that they were hamstrung because they inherited a Trump policy of withdrawal, they aren't entirely full of crap.
Candidate Biden, as a political tactic, decided to take the issue of Afghanistan off the table in 2020 by ceding the point to Trump. Despite his enthusiastic vote, advocacy, and support for the effort over the past 20 years, Biden pretended as though he supported withdrawal because Trump had already staked out a powerful claim on the issue. Biden chose to go along not because he believed it was the right thing to do, but (like every single stand the man has taken in his half-century in office) because he made the political calculation that it would help him advance.
So Biden will only focus on the question nobody is actually asking: Why did we leave Afghanistan? Literally, nobody is asking this. We are asking why did we leave Afghanistan in this way?
Here are three fundamental and straightforward questions reporters should be asking President Biden that we, the people, deserve straightforward answers to.
1. Why did we abandon the Bagram airfield before our Americans and their Afghan allies were evacuated?
This may be the mother of all mistakes in this entire episode. The Bagram airfield was under the control of the American military and was separated from the downtown chaos of Kabul's Hamid Karzai airport by 40 miles. On July 8, in the dead of night, the American military abandoned this strategic goldmine.
Here's how the Associated Press described the events at the time:
The U.S. left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left, Afghan military officials said.
Afghanistan’s army showed off the sprawling air base Monday, providing a rare first glimpse of what had been the epicenter of America’s war to unseat the Taliban and hunt down the al-Qaida perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks on America.
The U.S. announced Friday it had completely vacated its biggest airfield in the country in advance of a final withdrawal the Pentagon says will be completed by the end of August.
Had we coordinated the evacuation of Americans and our Afghan allies through Bagram rather than through a commercial airport in downtown Kabul, would we have avoided the chaos we saw unfold over the past ten days? Would we have been able to control access to the airfield and prevent the humiliating catastrophe unfolding before the world's eyes?
Would it not have been safer and saner to direct Americans who are still in the country to the American military airfield 40 miles from Afghanistan's capital city where our military could still control events rather than be beholden to Afghan security and Afghan logistics?
2. Why did we evacuate our military before every civilian and our Afghan allies were evacuated?
Isn't this kind of a no-brainer? When executing this withdrawal, shouldn't the trained soldiers, marines, and airmen be the last ones to turn out the lights? Does this question even need any further explanation?
And, yet, I still can't seem to find any of the professional journalists who've scored an exclusive interview with Blinken or Milley or Austin or Biden asking this fundamental question on the record.
3. Why didn't we destroy or dismantle military equipment lest it falls into the hands of the Taliban?
The answer to this is obvious, but Biden should be forced to say it on the record so that he can own it.
Obviously, he thought the Afghan army would use all of the billions of dollars of high-tech, advanced US weaponry to defend their country from the Taliban terrorists. Obviously, he was under the misguided belief that they had been trained to fight and not allow the Taliban to waltz in and take our drones, tanks and aircraft.
We know Biden thought this because these were his prepared words on July 8:
Together, with our NATO Allies and partners, we have trained and equipped over three hu- — nearly 300,000 current serving members of the military — of the Afghan National Security Force, and many beyond that who are no longer serving. Add to that, hundreds of thousands more Afghan National Defense and Security Forces trained over the last two decades.
We provided our Afghan partners with all the tools — let me emphasize: all the tools, training, and equipment of any modern military. We provided advanced weaponry. And we’re going to continue to provide funding and equipment. And we’ll ensure they have the capacity to maintain their air force.
After his prepared remarks, a reporter drilled down on the issue, specifically, whether the fall of Afghanistan at the hands of the Taliban was inevitable. Biden's reply displays a remarkable level of confidence in the Afghan army we've spent two decades training and equipping.
Q Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?
THE PRESIDENT: No, it is not.
Q Why?
THE PRESIDENT: Because you — the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable.
There are only two possible explanations for Biden's confidence that the Taliban would not do exactly what they did in the several weeks after he made these remarks. Either he was lying and knew full well the Afghan army would fold, or his military advisers convinced him this would not happen and they were tragically and horrifically wrong.
If Biden was lying, he should be impeached. If his military advisers were wrong, they should be fired.
Biden has not answered these or any significant questions about the manner in which he directed our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Instead, he attempts to change the subject to whether we should have withdrawn or, laughingly, to infrastructure spending. On the one occasion he took questions from reporters, they were pre-selected and he fumbled even those pre-approved queries.
Since then, he has consistently turned his back on the press, the cameras, the American people, and the responsibilities of his office.
His avoidance will not make these fundamental questions go away. We deserve answers, and eventually, we will get them.
