Success, it is said, has many parents, whereas failure is always an orphan. But in the case of Afghanistan, failure has four fathers. (I use the word “fathers” specifically as men have traditionally held power and so can be held accountable for most of the world’s ills to date.)
As the current occupant of the White House, President Joe Biden owns the debacle that is the withdrawal of Americans and Afghan allies from Kabul — a debacle that exploded Thursday, Aug. 26, as scores of people, including 13 U.S. troops, were killed in suicide bombings at Kabul Airport. The Republicans are, of course, beside themselves with glee — not that people were killed but that Biden is in deep trouble. For them, it’s Christmas Day, Benghazi times the apocalypse. They’ll drag this out in hearings forever, overshadowing the hearings into the Jan. 6 insurrection, in which their party has played a less than stellar role.
But the seeds for the Afghan disaster were planted by Republican President George W. Bush, who went into Afghanistan ostensibly to root out Al-Qaeda after 9/11, which he did, and to get Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, which he didn’t. The Taliban, which ruled and terrorized Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, was ready to surrender then. But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said we don’t negotiate with terrorists, which is precisely what we’re doing now. So we had the Taliban on the ropes and let the group slip away. This led us to the war in Iraq and the defeat of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, both of which had nothing to do with Afghanistan, Bin Laden, the war on terror, Al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
Then it was Democratic President Barack Obama’s turn. The president who voted against the Iraq War as a senator and said he wasn’t against war, just stupid ones, looked to disengage America from Afghanistan until he realized he couldn’t and instead doubled down. He at least got Bin Laden — in Pakistan.
Obama was, of course, famously succeeded by a man who was so jealous of him that he determined to do the exact opposite of everything his predecessor did. Republican President Donald J. Trump’s get-out-of-Dodge approach to Afghanistan was all about bringing home the troops by Christmas so he could look good with his base and win reelection. Never mind that he was willing to meet with the Taliban at Camp David right before 9/11. The outrageousness of this drew the ire of fellow Republicans like Rep. Liz Cheney, a Trump critic whose father, former Bush Vice President Dick Cheney, was, with Rumsfeld, the architect of W.’s catastrophic Mideast policy.
Which brings us to Biden, who felt the need to honor Trump’s treaty to withdraw American forces by a certain time. Why? Trump took us out of the Paris Climate Accord. Biden put us back in — new administration, new policies. But for some reason, Biden is determined to leave Afghanistan in the worst way. Why will remain the $64,000 question for years to come.
Say this about the Afghan mess, now the Afghan heartbreak: It has been that ever-elusive thing, a bipartisan enterprise. And that is the only “good” thing you can say about it.