The Sordid Politics of the Kabul Evacuation

The debate over the withdrawal from Afghanistan is complicated, and mostly stupid. The “catastrophe” of the evacuation has become a GOP talking point, and generally speaking the media has failed to push back on this. While Biden dropping out of the race has taken much of the wind from the sails of this narrative, we’re still seeing the GOP trying to pin Kabul on Harris to credulous media operatives.

Getting the context out of the way: The fall of the Kabul regime was a tragedy for a great many Afghans, and the restoration of Taliban rule good news for a lot of terrible people (get a whisky in me and I’ll tell you the same thing about the fall of Saigon, but for some reason people still want to believe that the butchers in Hanoi were doing a “liberation” rather than a conquest). This doesn’t mean that the US should have stayed longer; sometimes the bad guys win and there’s no point in hanging around any longer than is absolutely necessary. But it’s okay to be unhappy about a tragedy and to look for someone to blame. Unfortunately, the conversation that happened in the wake of the Kabul evacuation streamlined the apportionment of blame, obscuring and misallocating responsibility in a way that was simple, satisfying, and completely wrong.

Sorting through responsibility for the deaths of thirteen Marines and 160 Afghans during the fall of Kabul is complicated, because it requires us to disaggregate three categories of failure:

1. Responsibility for the failure of the Afghanistan Campaign of the Wars on Terror
2. Responsibility for the collapse of the Kabul government
3. Responsibility for the management of the evacuation of US and allied personnel from Kabul in August 2021

Sticking just to the last two occupants of the Oval Office… Donald Trump is absolutely not responsible for Failure One, and Joe Biden is mostly not responsible. Biden participated in decisions as both VP and Senator that produced Failure One, but he wasn’t decisive to their outcome and was usually on the right side of those debates. Both Trump and Biden bear responsibility for Failure Two, but in neither case does the fault belong solely or even predominantly to them. The die was probably cast on Afghanistan before Trump came to power, and certainly before Biden assumed the Presidency. With respect to Failure Three both Biden and Trump bear responsibility, which is not quite the same as saying they deserve blame. Both were more committed than the bulk of the national security bureaucracy to getting out of Afghanistan, Trump since at least the beginning of his Presidency and Biden since the mid-point of the Obama Presidency. Trump’s arrangement with the Taliban wrong-footed the Kabul government, but that’s like saying he gave Covid to a Stage IV cancer patient. Saving the Kabul government was probably beyond Biden’s capabilities by January 2021, but the policies he undertook helped bring about the specific circumstances of the August evacuation.

To pause for a moment… FWIW I became convinced that collapse was likely during my year in Carlisle, during conversations in which basically nobody could bring themselves to voice any optimism about the mission. I had previously been far too credulous of official reporting on Afghanistan and far too structural in my thinking about the survival of the Kabul government; I figured that it was not likely to fall because its fall benefitted no one, which turned out to be wrong on the one hand (it benefitted Pakistan, the most important regional player) and on the other hand (no one else really cared). This hit hard because I worked with faculty, students, and alums from all over the Afghanistan policy universe; Afghans, NGO workers, soldiers, diplomats, etc., and it was horrifying to watch all of that effort collapse.

Anyway, an evacuation under fire is an immensely complex military operation that it is incredibly dangerous and very difficult to pull off well. Were there identifiable failures that helped produce the situation where thirteen Marines died? Absolutely. Would there have been errors and failures and risks in literally any other evacuation scenario? Obviously. People don’t like to think about it in these terms, but let’s be blunt: What was your over/under expectation for the number of American military personnel to die in this operation? If you asked me to bet the over/under on the number “13” I would have taken the over in a heartbeat. Not even a shred of hesitation. I strongly suspect that just about everyone with any kind of military or national security experience, from the lowliest NCO to the National Security Advisor, would also have taken the Over. The chances that the entire operation would go off without a mortar or a MANPAD or a mechanical failure taking down a C-17 was almost ludicrously low. And it’s not even as if people won’t admit that. They just won’t talk about it, or even acknowledge that it’s the kind of calculation that lays at the core of every national security decision that this country has ever made.

But even a successful evacuation is a defeat and this defeat became emblematic of the entire war, as all three Failures were wrapped into one. The storyline developed rapidly. Trump disavowed his very real responsibility for making the evacuation happen. The very few remaining Afghanistan hawks had a field day exploiting the very real misery than the evacuation caused. A lot of folks who did not care and who had not been paying attention were horrified not just by the spectacle of the evacuation but also by the tragedy of the collapse. Instead of coming to the defense of the Biden administration, the Restrainers (almost to an individual) decided that they needed to dunk an all of the folks that they’d been arguing with for a decade. Part of this was poor message discipline; when put to it they’ll argue “it’s not our responsibility to defend the Biden administration’s mess” which is of course complete, amateurish nonsense; providing political cover when a politician does a thing you like is JOB NUMBER ONE FOR A POLITICALLY-ORIENTED THINK TANK. But part is that Restrainers don’t like to highlight that the withholding of American military powers can lead to dreadful consequences in the short-term, whatever its positive impact in the medium or long-term. The fall of Kabul wasn’t their fault, but it also wasn’t good for the brand.

Generally speaking defeat is an orphan, but in this case defeat became Hunter Biden, owned solely by the President who was in office on the day defeat happened. Ironically, Biden had argued back in 2011 that remaining in Afghanistan might cost Obama the 2012 election; it turned out that withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2021 caused irreparable damage to Biden’s presidency. It’s not even really true, as some have asserted, that the media loved this war. By 2021 the media was completely indifferent to Afghanistan. The media wanted a storyline, an explanation for the bad thing that happened. Blaming Biden for the deaths of the 13 Marines (and a much larger number of Afghans) helps to tie up all of the loose ends assorted with the Unpleasantness. Assigning blame for those thirteen deaths means that no one has to deal with the sticky question of responsibility for Failure One or Failure Two. And of course in a way that makes sense; why would anyone ever want to celebrate a good punt in the 4th quarter of a game you’re losing 42-6? If the evacuation had gone absolutely perfectly without a single American casualty it wouldn’t have helped Biden a bit, although it might have forestalled some of the harm.

And so we witness the sordid spectacle of watching Joe Biden assume the politically poisonous responsibility for a withdrawal that almost every policymaker of note wanted at a price that almost every policymaker of note would have paid. The worst part is that the lesson for future policymakers is “push the looming disaster back as far as possible so that it happens off my watch,” rather than “we need to make good decisions right now about this commitment.”