Needed: a fair look
The lesson of presidential power is not learned from how it is exercised in the best of times but how it manifests in crisis. In crisis come mistakes and from mistakes hopefully come knowledge to improve future decisions.
President Joe Biden has already said he will not demand resignations for the death of 13 service members and countless Afghans at the hand of a suicide bomber during the final days of the airlift. This week, Biden described the evacuation as an “extraordinary success” although Americans and Afghans who wanted to leave remained as the last plane departed without them.
Still, questions must be answered, both internally and externally, about the decisions and tactics leading up to and through the United States’ final moment in Afghanistan. Historians and pundits will debate whether the die of inevitability was cast years ago, but there can be no denial of the departure from Kabul, while historic and massive, heroic and tragic, also represented a failure of imagination.
We’ve heard that critique before in presidential history. Yale psychologist Irving Janis called the decision-making mistakes of the Bay of Pigs disaster as “groupthink,” which has come to describe the pursuit of consensus in a way that prevents alternatives from being properly considered. According to a Harvard Business Review case study, historian Arthur Schlesinger later wrote that “our meetings were taking place in a curious atmosphere of assumed consensus, [and] not one spoke against it.”
The nation must traverse the avenue of tough questions in regard to Afghanistan. The after-action review of the 9/11 Commission—an independent, bipartisan panel—identified missed signs, unresolved contradictory intelligence and information silos that collected crucial information but were unable or unwilling to connect to threat indications in other parts of government. The commission’s overall conclusion was that coordination and information sharing could have presented a clearer and perhaps actionable warning of the pending terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
Into this moment, we urge Congress to authorize an independent, bipartisan commission to review the final stages of the end of American presence in Afghanistan—from the Trump administration’s ill-advised unilateral peace agreement with the Taliban through the Biden administration’s chaotic evacuation.
This commission must have credible leadership along the lines of what Republican Tom Kean, a former governor, and Democrat Lee Hamilton, a former U.S. congressman, provided the nation after the 9/11 attacks.