President Biden rushed back to the White House on Monday to rescue his presidency amid growing criticism of how he handled the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
While most Americans favor ending the 20-year-old war, Mr. Biden’s mishandling of the end game has raised fresh doubts about his leadership in a crisis, just seven months into his administration.
“It’s obviously an embarrassing display of American incompetence,” said Gil Barndollar, a senior fellow at Defense Priorities who deployed twice to Afghanistan. “This administration owns some of that.”
As the national security emergency deepened last week, and the administration scrambled to evacuate the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, the president was out of sight at Camp David.
When it became clear over the weekend that Kabul would fall to the Islamist Taliban militia, Mr. Biden blamed former President Donald Trump for leaving him with a bad situation.
On July 8, Mr. Biden had assured Americans that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was unlikely, and that the Afghan army was one of the best-equipped in the world.
As of Monday, a video of Mr. Biden being as wrong could be had been viewed more than 9 million times.
It was against that backdrop that Mr. Biden returned to the White House — interrupting a vacation divided between Camp David and Delaware — to give a televised address on the crisis and to show he’s in charge.
Mr. Biden forcefully defended his decision to withdraw, but touched on the chaotic evacuation only briefly.
“After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces,” Mr. Biden said. “The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.”
He said he wouldn’t “shrink” from his responsibility for the situation. But he also pointed blame at his predecessor for drawing down troops and scheduling an initial withdrawal date of May 1.
There were calls Monday even among Democrats for heads to roll in the administration. Some critics suggested Mr. Biden should fire White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, while others said Secretary of State Antony Blinken should quit.
“President Joe Biden needs to shake up his national security team,” Brett Bruen, director of global engagement in the Obama White House, wrote in USA Today. “The people, plans and processes the president has put in place to keep America safe are not working.”
Sen. Tom Carper, a Democrat from Mr. Biden’s home state of Delaware, said the withdrawal of U.S. troops “should have been carefully planned to prevent violence and instability, and to ensure that the hard-fought progress gained over the past two decades — particularly when it comes to Afghan women and girls — would not be lost.”
Mr. Barndollar said the president’s future political capital could be at the mercy of what the Taliban does next, and whether a humanitarian crisis results.
“If there are immediate massacres, if you have tens of thousands of dead Hazara [an ethnic minority] in a week or other searing pictures of human-rights abuses, then that’s going to be one thing,” Mr. Barndollar said.
But “if the Taliban is relatively restrained in its immediate assumption of power and does not want to be a pariah state or version 2.0 of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, that’s a different story,” he said.
The extent of the fallout in Congress for the rest of Mr. Biden’s agenda is unclear.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California has called for an investigation of Mr. Biden’s handling of the crisis, and other lawmakers are raising more questions about the president’s decision-making in an emergency.
Sen. Mark Warner, Virginia Democrat and chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said he plans to “ask tough but necessary questions about why we weren’t better prepared for a worst-case scenario involving such a swift and total collapse of the Afghan government and security forces.”
Sen. Joni Ernst, Iowa Republican, said Mr. Biden should have addressed the nation weeks ago, and called it “a tenuous time” for the nation.
“We need leadership right now in the United States, and Biden is not providing that leadership,” she told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday.
Despite the ugly and chaotic end to U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, polling has consistently shown that a significant majority of Americans favor getting out of the war.
A July Politico-Morning Consult poll last month found that 59% of registered voters supported Mr. Biden’s plan to withdraw all U.S. troops by Sept. 11, while 25% said they were opposed.
“I think it’s going to be forgotten pretty quickly,” Mr. Barndollar said. “I think we never cared that much in the first place, even when at the height of this we had 100,000 troops there, because a lot of Americans weren’t even really aware of that. So I suspect this is going to be largely water under the bridge fairly quickly, as dispiriting as that is as a citizen in the republic.”
Hussein Ibish, a scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, said “this debacle in Afghanistan won’t harm Biden politically in the long run. Most Americans will be glad to be out.”
But he said in a blog post that Mr. Biden “rushed” to implement Mr. Trump’s agreement and timetable for withdrawal “in the most slapdash and hasty manner imaginable.”
A poll released Monday by the conservative Convention of States Action with The Trafalgar Group found that 69.3% of American voters disapprove of how Mr. Biden is handling U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. Only 23.1% of American voters in the survey approve of how the president is handling U.S. military operations there.
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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