Vice President Kamala Harris once thought that bragging about President Biden’s troop withdrawal from Afghanistan was part of her role.
In a May 2021 commencement speech at the U.S. Naval Academy, she told graduates she was the last person in the room with Mr. Biden just before he made his momentous decision to follow through with the withdrawal plans and end 20 years of war.
Fast-forward to August that year, and Ms. Harris was on a preplanned trip to visit Asian allies as the withdrawal was going wrong.
Ms. Harris repeatedly ducked reporters’ questions and aligned her remarks with the party line. She said her heart went out to troops in harm’s way and the administration was trying to evacuate as many Afghans as possible before the Taliban revived their repressive rule.
An adviser told the Los Angeles Times that Ms. Harris was “100% all in” with Mr. Biden’s decision about the withdrawal, but she kept her public statements to the minimum. After 13 American troops and 170 Afghans were killed in a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate, Ms. Harris left the talking to Mr. Biden.
Three years after the fall of Kabul, Ms. Harris has escaped political damage from the Biden administration’s first major international stumble, and experts doubt that will change.
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“Because the withdrawal from Afghanistan was associated so closely personally with President Biden, we don’t have a good sense of VP Harris’ own views on it — and that is precisely why I think it will be hard for the Trump campaign to make criticism of the Afghan withdrawal a real sticking point against Harris,” Madiha Afzal, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, said in an email.
That dashes a key part of Republicans’ campaign strategy.
When Mr. Biden was the opposing candidate, the Afghanistan withdrawal, particularly the president’s treatment of the families of the 13 troops, was a major line of attack.
The Republican National Convention dedicated a lengthy portion of its third night to the families, who vented their frustrations with Mr. Biden. One said Mr. Biden kept checking his watch during the ceremony for the troops as their bodies arrived back on U.S. soil. Others complained that the president had never publicly said the 13 troops’ names.
“During last month’s debate, he claimed no service members have died during his administration. None. That hurt us all deeply,” said Herman Lopez, the father of Marine Corps Cpl. Hunter Lopez.
The anger was heavily focused on Mr. Biden and has not bled over to Ms. Harris.
John McLaughlin, a pollster for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, said they want to change that.
“She was fully supportive of what Joe Biden did to surrender in Afghanistan — when they left Americans there and billions in American equipment for the Taliban,” he said. “She didn’t do anything to engage the Gold Star families who lost their sons and daughters in that debacle at the airport.”
The House Foreign Affairs Committee is working on a major Afghanistan report, due out next month, and said Mr. Harris’ role will be part of that analysis.
Ms. Harris’ campaign didn’t respond to an inquiry for this article.
Ms. Harris’ foreign policy views are under more general scrutiny now that she is the Democratic presidential candidate.
The White House says she visited 21 countries as vice president, including trips to Central America to try to get a handle on the surge of illegal immigrants headed north and the trip to Asia that was dominated by the Afghanistan collapse.
The White House says she has met with 150 foreign leaders.
Think tank analysts debate how Ms. Harris might differ from Mr. Biden on hot spots in Ukraine, Israel and China, but multiple experts reached by The Washington Times brushed off questions about Ms. Harris and Afghanistan, saying they hadn’t given it thought.
Mr. McLaughlin said voters, too, aren’t giving it thought — yet.
“They do know that Joe Biden failed, but you realize for the last 3½ years, the Biden administration really didn’t showcase her because she was less popular than Joe Biden,” he said.
Looming decisions for the next president include how to handle thousands of Afghans who assisted the U.S. war effort and were promised visas but remain stuck in Afghanistan. The U.S. has no diplomatic presence in the country, so those Afghans cannot complete the interview portion of the visa process unless they can make their way to another country.
The U.S. also faces big decisions about whether and how to continue sending financial aid to Afghanistan through relief organizations. An inspector general reported recently that the Taliban had siphoned millions of dollars of that money into their accounts by charging taxes and fees on the aid organizations.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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