Political toll of Biden's mishandled Afghanistan end game may be slight

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Sometimes the campaign ads write themselves. 

At some point prior to the fast-approaching 2022 midterm election, Republican operatives will step into a dark editing room and cut a TV spot with President Biden’s prior comments on Afghanistan, and how it’s no Vietnam. 

“There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in ... Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable," the president said on July 8. Look for that audio to accompany this weekend’s dramatic images of helicopters evacuating people from Kabul to its airport. They were Chinooks, the same kind of choppers that were used in Saigon in 1975. 

Who lost Afghanistan?

Of Afghanistan, perhaps the ads will ask the question that was asked after Saigon fell, and in 1949, after China fell to the communists: Who lost it? Armchair analysts, of which there are many, will say, “Well, Biden did, because it happened on this watch.” Yes, they think, it’s just that simple. 

But such comments have an underlying and false assumption to them, namely that these places somehow were ours to begin with. As was the case with Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Vietnam, and more, many Americans have always seemed to think that somehow, the United States can single-handedly impose its will upon others. Decades of wasted blood and treasure tell us otherwise and yet such views live on. Since the end of the Second World War, this enduring and misguided hubris has cost us dearly.   

Beyond the TV imagery, if you want some sort of comparison between Vietnam and Afghanistan, consider this: five presidents – three Republicans and two Democrats –controlled policy on Vietnam: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and finally, Ford. Four presidents – two from each party – controlled policy on Afghanistan: Bush, Obama, Trump, and finally, Biden. 

Ford became president after a peace deal had been signed by his Republican predecessor and U.S. troops were withdrawn. Biden became president after a peace deal had been signed by his Republican predecessor and the vast majority of U.S. troops had been withdrawn. Had President Donald Trump been re-elected, the final ones might have left by May 1, the date he originally set. It would have been messy then, and it's messy now, though perhaps unnecessarily so, given how Biden was caught off guard by the Taliban blitzkrieg. 

US victory? Turmoil and Taliban gains in Afghanistan prove it will never be possible

Perhaps, just perhaps, we wouldn’t even be in this position today if U.S. troops had finished off Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora in December 2001, which a Senate report – partially based on this little-known study by none other than the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command – claims helped lay the “foundation for today’s protracted Afghan insurgency.”

Or perhaps, just perhaps, if we had gotten out after finally getting the al-Qaida leader a decade later in Pakistan. We’ll be debating all this for years to come. 

Not just Biden's fault 

Of course, you’ll never find such nuances and history in the TV commercials that will soon appear. Biden is in charge now, this catastrophe is appearing on his watch, and he will have to take his lumps. That’s the way it goes. Life, and politics, are often unfair. Yet as bad as things look for Biden today, I wonder just how much long-term damage this will actually do to him. In late April 1975, as the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army closed in on Saigon, Ford’s Gallup approval stood at 39% – he had been hammered by his post-Watergate pardon of Nixon – yet by the end of June, just two months later, it was 52%. 

Americans were sick of Vietnam, at the time the longest war in American history, and the president said enough was enough. Ford’s election bid the next year failed, but it wasn’t because of his refusal to go back into Vietnam. The pardon and a rough economy did him in.

DePetris: Taliban victory? Despite collapse in Kabul, withdrawal was the right course in Afghanistan

Americans are sick of Afghanistan too, but the pandemic and the economy – which are joined at the hip – will certainly prove to be much larger forces for voters. It’s also August, a time when most people aren’t paying attention. My sense is that Americans are in a period when we are looking inward, a common occurrence after a war has been waged, and particularly with domestic problems mounting, as they are now.  

Let me end with this: None of this should diminish the human catastrophe we are seeing in Afghanistan right now. It makes me ill to think of the wave of suffering that is engulfing that sad land. It will be particularly bad for women and girls. May God watch over them. But after 20 years and $2 trillion in spending, if the Afghan Army won’t stand up  to defend its own people, what is the United States to do? Biden is right, as Trump was. We cannot be the world’s policeman.  

Paul Brandus is the founder and White House bureau chief of West Wing Reports and a member of Paste BN's Board of Contributors. His latest book is "Jackie: Her Transformation from First Lady to Jackie O." Follow him on Twitter: @WestWingReport