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Notes -
How much is Biden's 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal going to hurt him during the up-coming election? Will Republicans be able to make it a salient enough issue to convince swing-voters to change their votes (or at least not to vote D)? I remember disagreeing with a friend about this at the time, arguing that no one would care by 2024, while he passionately believed that it would still haunt him. Who does it look like was closer to being right?
I feel like it's been greatly overshadowed by the drama in Ukraine and Israel. Now I don't know if those things were reasonably predictable in 2021, and it's plausible that Afghanistan would loom larger if events had proceeded differently, but they didn't. I'd also see the case that even if not salient now, Afghanistan started off Bidens reign on a poor note, and may have influenced Russia's decision to invade Ukraine.
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The establishment Democrat messaging has been "we need to trust our foreign policy professionals" while Trump and Kennedy are both running more along the lines of "the State Department keeps fucking up and someone needs to yell at them". So it hurts Biden in that way.
It's more of a case of his supporters losing energy and enthusiasm instead of someone thinking of the issue and changing their vote.
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On its own, it won't hurt Biden, but it might as one element in a pattern. "Here are three times Biden's incompetence...."
But on its own, it runs into the problem that a lot of people agree with withdrawing from Afghanistan. So even if it docks points for execution, he gains from making the call. "Yes, the withdrawal didn't go perfectly, but he was only one who made the hard and correct decision".
There's also the part where the execution is quite explicitly not the President's job, and that framing a withdrawal order as something that required presidential micromanagement to not completely fuck up raises some extremely serious questions about the competence and professionalism of our military brass. I'm pretty sure the withdrawal fracas petered out the way it did because actually litigating the question would burn a whole lot of people, none of whom are named "Biden".
Have you seen the Afghanistan papers? Or even Hanania's thread on the Afghanistan papers? The whole war was a massive farce, absolutely staggering waste and corruption. Soldiers on the ground knew this, they were grinding their teeth at our Afghan 'allies' raping children in the barracks. The Soviet Union had all kinds of problems but their puppet state had 1000x the integrity of our puppet state, theirs actually outlasted the Soviet Union, ours disintegrated before we even finished leaving.
It was barely even a war, there was no goal behind it. The revolving door of commanders (16 commanders of ISAF in about 12 years) had no idea what they were supposed to do. One guy arrived and went 'well, I may as well try and raise Afghanistan a few places on child mortality indices'. We were fighting a war based on vibes like being democratic and humanitarian, on looking good in the media.
Armies are tasked with achieving political goals, not implementing vibes. It's not as though Johnny Taliban was better trained or equipped - Coalition forces won all the firefights, they had all the firepower. The political front was even more lopsided, in the opposite direction. Our people had no idea what the goal was, they pointlessly shovelled money into the hands of the worst people on earth without any kind of coherent plan. They were given a budget and told to spend it. This made war profitable for the enemy (which became everyone who wanted our money) - blow up a bridge so you're paid to provide security and get the contract to rebuild it!
I have.
I Am The Very Model Of A Culture-Warring Partisan, but the one good thing that has come from Biden's presidency is him slamming the door shut on the Afghanistan war. I credit him greatly with having the guts to do it, and I am pretty sure the disaster in the pullout was deliberate insubordination on the part of the Pentagon. For everything I've read about the incompetence of the occupation, I cannot bring myself to believe that they are actually incapable of executing an orderly pullout. To my knowledge, no one has ever been held accountable for the mess, and I'd really like to see that happen.
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Yes, that's true.
I think that for the withdrawal to hurt Biden, there would need to be some proof of executive micromanaging, like overruling defence plans or imposing artificial restrictions on how the withdrawal was conducted.
Which probably didn't happen, other than maybe imposing a timeline over defence foot-dragging. (Though it might have, and both sides are keeping quiet to avoid burning each other.)
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It won't. Attacking him from this angle would require arguing that the occupation of Afghanistan should have continued, and that is not an argument anyone wants to take on.
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