Joe Biden has been thinking about the broader politics of a moment like this for over a decade
Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images The White House’s usual calculus was no longer cutting it by Monday night, a fact that was becoming undeniable with each new wave of desperate reports from Kabul.
When Biden returned early to the White House from a long weekend at Camp David, he felt compelled to again explain the duty he felt to finally end the unpopular two-decade war, declaring: “I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth president, I will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little more time in Afghanistan will make all the difference.
But the clarity of Biden’s goal and administration officials’ insistence that he faced a binary choice with one clear, popular option did little to explain the images of thousands of Afghans crowding onto Hamid Karzai International Airport tarmac, desperate to get out.
But those same talking points raised the ire even of Democrats supportive of Biden and the withdrawal. Of particular concern was a line claiming: “Many have asked why we did not evacuate more Afghanistan civilians, sooner. Part of the answer is that many did not want to leave earlier: Many Afghans to whom we gave visas to come to the US chose to stay in their country, still hopeful.” There was a crush of Afghans trying to get out, and no one should have been surprised, these lawmakers say.
Joe took the position, plain and simple, that we have to get out of Afghanistan. I reminded him that the president and Hillary and indeed, I think, Joe himself had talked about a residual presence like Iraq, which he said he’d been working on most of the last year, that we would need congressional appropriations to train the army and the police and give economic assistance, we wouldn’t get any of that if women were sent back to the black years and the dark ages.
Still, as more scenes from the airport in Kabul hit cable news, frustration simmered as they couldn’t make this case more clearly: “There’s no good way to talk about it, and there’s no good way you can describe this as anything other than Afghanistan’s version of the fall of Saigon. It’s mortifying,” said a second senior Senate Democratic aide. “It’s what we’ve always wanted, to end this endless war, and it does seem like there are no Americans being threatened,” said a third.
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