Yes, Biden’s Afghanistan Withdrawal Was a ‘Decision’ — a Bad One

Let’s say you know someone in an unhappy marriage. And maybe you’re even sympathetic to his grievances, about which he never stops talking. For years, he has regaled you with his plan to dissolve that bond as amicably as possible, and you had become convinced that such an outcome was probably for the best. But when the time came to act, he left his family broken, indebted, bitter over their abandonment, and a source of constant concern to the community your friend left behind. Would you defend that person’s actions by insisting that, at the very least, he “had the moral courage to make a decision”? Probably not, insofar as the moral content of that “decision” is indefensible. But that is the last redoubt available to the few Democrats still willing to mortgage their credibility by defending Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“Joe Biden had the moral courage to make a decision that previous presidents had refused to make because of some cost bias and groupthink,” said Representative Jake Auchincloss (D., Mass.) in a Monday morning interview on CNN. “That war had no political endgame,” he continued. “The national government in Kabul had no agenda and no capacity to build a nation, and so Americans were left holding the bag.”

Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was certainly “a decision.” In the abstract, it might even be defensible to support withdrawal as the optimal outcome for all parties, regardless of the short-term pain it would produce. But Auchincloss must dwell in the realm of abstraction, because Biden’s execution of America’s withdrawal from Central Asia was indefensible.

Biden inherited from Donald Trump the rudiments of a withdrawal plan, which his administration subsequently revised in negotiations with the Taliban. He drew down the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan to a skeleton force while leaving civilians — U.S. citizens and their foreign allies alike — in place. He abandoned Bagram Airbase, sacrificing the country’s most efficient point of exfiltration. His State Department insisted the U.S. Embassy in Kabul would “remain open” and had “well-developed security plans to safely protect our personnel & facilities” when neither was true. He halted airstrikes on advancing Taliban positions until that course became untenable. And when Kabul fell, the Biden administration relied on the Taliban to ensure America’s safe and speedy withdrawal — a task to which that medieval, terrorism-sponsoring organization was not equal. Thirteen American service members and over 170 Afghan civilians died in a terrorist attack on the human tide that descended on Kabul airport in the scramble to escape Afghanistan alive. And when the U.S. bugged out, thousands of people who should have been evacuees were left behind.

Donald Trump plans to spend today, the third anniversary of the bloody attack on Abbey Gate, attempting “to connect Harris to the chaotic Afghanistan War withdrawal” — an objective made infinitely more achievable by Harris’s acceptance of the premise that she was one of the last people “in the room” when Biden settled on his withdrawal plan and that she was “comfortable” with it. And like Auchincloss, when Harris made those remarks, she focused not on the desirability of the “decision” Biden made, preferring instead to note that it was, in fact, a decision.

“He is someone, who I have seen over and over again, make decisions based on what he truly believes . . . is the right thing to do,” Harris observed. “I have seen him over and over again make decisions based exactly on what he believes is right.” We’ve all known people whose calculations do not account for the welfare of others and whose pursuit of what they believe is “right” does immeasurable harm. That is not a defense of reckless behavior. Rather, it’s an indictment.