The Trump withdrawal
The Biden administration deserves plenty of blame for its precipitous and illplanned exit from Afghanistan. Naturally, a sense of decency and consistency has not prevented former president Donald Trump and his minions from adding their voices to the chorus of criticism, even though they designed this exit strategy and lauded it until the last moment.
We are now being treated to the contemptible spectacle of people who sent the airplane into a nosedive complaining about the resulting crash.
As recently as April 18, Trump said: “Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do. I planned to withdraw on May 1, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible.”
On June 26, he bragged: “I started the process. All the troops are coming back home. They couldn’t stop the process. Twenty-one years is enough, don’t we think?”
Now he is calling the situation “not acceptable” and saying that the troop withdrawal should have been “conditions based”—which wasn’t part of the deal he struck with the Taliban. He is demanding that President Joe Biden “resign in disgrace for what he has allowed to happen to Afghanistan”—for carrying out Trump’s policy. Bizarrely, Trump is even castigating Biden for failing to “blow up all the forts,” as if U.S. forces were fighting in the Middle Ages.
Trump’s partner in hypocrisy, as in misgovernment, is former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.
As recently as July, Pompeo was eager to “applaud” the withdrawal, saying he wanted “the Afghans to take up the fight for themselves.” Last Sunday, by contrast, he was fulminating that “weak American leadership always harms American security.” He went on to ludicrously accuse the Biden administration of being “focused on critical race theory while the embassy is at risk.”
Hold my non-alcoholic beer, says former vice president Mike Pence. On Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal, he offered a master class in blame-shifting and buck-passing. “The Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan is a foreign-policy humiliation,” he thundered, “unlike anything our country has endured since the Iran hostage crisis.”
In Pence’s alternative universe, the reason the Taliban won was because Biden extended the Trump deadline for withdrawal by a few months: “Once Mr. Biden broke the deal, the Taliban launched a major offensive against the Afghan government and seized Kabul. They knew there was no credible threat of force under this president.”
You would never know from reading this mendacious twaddle that the Taliban never agreed to a lasting cease-fire and never stopped attacking even when Trump and Pence were in office. (More than 3,000 Afghan civilians were killed in 2020.)
Let’s get real. When it comes to Afghanistan, Trump and Biden are, as Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton said on Wednesday, “like Tweedledee and Tweedledum.”
“While Biden bears responsibly for bungling the implementation,” Bolton said, “I have no confidence Trump would have executed it any more competently.”
Given how many other policies Trump bungled, from the pandemic to migrant children, there is every reason to expect that he would have found some way to outdo Biden in mismanaging Afghanistan.
At least Biden is now trying to airlift U.S. allies out of Afghanistan. Better late than never. It’s hard to imagine Trump doing even that much given the anti-immigrant animus of his base.