Is Biden To Blame For The Current Catastrophe In Afghanistan?
Biden should assume some responsibility for the disaster in Afghanistan, but we must remember who caused this needless war in the first place.
by Ben Cohen
President Biden voted for the war in Afghanistan in 2001. He supported its occupation and voted to spend more money and commit more troops when it started going wrong. Biden soured on the conflict when he became Vice President in 2009 and has long since wanted the US to “get the heck out of there". Biden, perhaps correctly, saw no good options in Afghanistan and urged President Obama to disengage as quickly as possible.
As President Biden has fulfilled his campaign promise to pull troops out of the country and “end the forever wars” America has gotten so used to. As a consequence, he will now assume at least some responsibility for the tragic humanitarian disaster unfolding there.
While Biden may be right that the decades long conflict in Afghanistan is un winnable, by cutting and running, America now leaves millions of innocent civilians to an unthinkably horrific fate. Biden is being criticized from across the political spectrum and has been savaged by America’s allies abroad, many of whom believe America has betrayed Afghanistan. “The early withdrawal was a serious and far-reaching miscalculation by the current administration,” said Norbert Röttgen, chairman of Germany’s foreign relations committee. “This does fundamental damage to the political and moral credibility of the West.”
Is this fair? Could Biden have done things differently, and more importantly, should he have?
A Neo Con war
While Biden and the Democrats share responsibility for America’s disastrous involvement in Afghanistan, the Republicans — specifically the Neo Cons — must take the lion’s share of the blame for what is now happening.
George W. Bush authorized the war in 2001 on the basis that Afghanistan was harboring Al Qaeda terrorists, then committed the US to nation building after installing an inept and corrupt interim government. As insurgents continued to defy the haphazard US occupation, the Bush administration could never decide what the war was about and continued pouring billions of dollars into a long series of failures. As professor at George Mason University Ahsan I Butt wrote, “Washington made its own bed on this score: it chose to centralise power in Kabul despite Afghanistan’s political history being marked by relatively autonomous regions and provinces, and it chose to do so in the person of Hamid Karzai. It also chose to solve problems in Afghanistan by throwing money at it.”
In 2019, the Washington Post won the right to release a confidential trove of government documents that reveals how shambolic government thinking was early on in the conflict:…