President Biden's Astonishing Lack of Empathy For the Women and Girls of Afghanistan
Biden feels -- in his own words -- "zero responsibility" for the sad fate of women and girls in Afghanistan following the disastrous withdrawal of U.S. troops
I’ve been reading Franklin Foer’s new “it” book about the Biden Presidency, The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future (New York: Penguin Random House, 2023).
I plan a long post about the book and whether it changes my opinion that Joe Biden is the wrong person to represent Democrats as the 2024 nominee for the presidency.
But I just came across an episode in Foer’s book occurring within the larger early Biden presidential episode that first turned me against the president.
The larger episode was the hasty, awful, and deadly withdrawal of U.S. (and allied) forces from Afghanistan in 2021, turning that country over to the Taliban within the terms of a peace treaty negotiated earlier by former President Donald J. Trump.
I have just read in Foer’s book about an aspect I had not known about previously, though it was out in the open and reported in a major media — if you happened to be a viewer of CBS that day in 2020.
Foer reports in Chapter Ten, “Biden’s War,” that as the former chief Democratic U.S. senator in charge of foreign policy and again as vice president, Biden had visited Afghanistan many times:
“He had spent night in sleeping bags on the floors of conference rooms; he had stood in line alongside marines and junior foreign service officers, wrapped in a towel, waiting his turn to shower.
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According to Joe Biden’s moral code, ingratitude is a grievous sin. The United States had evicted the Taliban from power; it had dispatched young men to die in the nation’s mountains, it had given the new government billions in aid. But Afghan officials kept hectoring him about how the US hadn’t done enough.
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He began to draw unsentimental conclusions about the Afghan war — conclusions that the rest of the foreign policy elites resisted. He could see the Afghan government was a corrupt, failed enterprise. He could see that a nation-building campaign on the scale of Afghanistan was beyond American capacity.
… [As vice president], Biden experienced what one aide described as his “fuck-this-shit moment.” He could no longer envision a successful end to the war and began to clamor for withdrawal.
[H]e would corner General David Petraeus, one of the true believers in the war, in the Situation Room. After the meetings ended, Biden would grab Petraeus by the shoulders and refuse to let go, pleading with the general to heed his arguments for drawing down America’s troop presence. Petraeus would just stand there, unable to extricate himself from the vice president’s grasp and his impassioned monologue, as his schedule for the afternoon fell into disarray.
For eight years as vice president, Biden kept hearing the same set of pleas from the generals and State Department planners: Just one more year, that’s all it will take to create a stable political system; just one more year and corruption will fade. Biden became convinced the United States could stay for decades and nothing would ever change.”
Now we jump to Biden in the White House as president. We begin with Biden’s planning with National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair General Mark Milley for the withdrawal. Biden asked them to respond to four questions. He called them “inputs” to his decision.
He wanted to know: What was the terrorism threat globally — and in Afghanistan? Could the government in Kabul survive if the US withdrew? Were the Taliban abiding by the deal they brokered with Trump? And finally, what were Russia, China, India, Iran, and Pakistan thinking about Afghanistan?
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Back in the Obama administration, Biden was a strident participant in discussions. This time, he tried to play the role of facilitator. This time, he tried to play the role of facilitator. He presented himself as someone Keely aware of the dangers of groupthink. “Whoever disagrees, speak up now,” he would say. Or, when he musters an opinion in meetings, he would add, “Someone challenge me here.”
And he was challenged. Just as he anticipated, his generals presented a grim portrait of the aftermath of the war. Miley warned him that Kabul might fall to the Taliban, which would erode all the good work that Americans had done in the country. The United States would, in effect, had the country over to a political movement that had once happily provided a sanctuary for terrorism. He believed a contingent of about 2,500 troops, 4,000 at the outermost, would be sufficient to hold off the Taliban and support the Afghan government, until the United States brokered a political agreement with the Taliban.
After the meetings, Biden kept Jake Sullivan in the room and only then revealed his inner thoughts. “The way I’m hearing, the argument for staying is …” And then Biden would recapitulate what he heard, before asking, “Is that enough?” The answer was always “no.” As Biden summarized the debate, everyone kept telling him that staying in Afghanistan was an insurance policy against the threat that the country might become a terrorist harbor again. But in his conversations with Sullivan, he was adamant that the premium was too high.
On March 4 [2021], Sullivan ended the day with his deputy Jon Finer and Yohannes Abraham, the chief of staff of the National Security Council. Normally, he liked to sit with them and breezily review every crisis that had crossed their desks. But Sullivan wasn’t in a schmoozy mode. He was red in the face and raining expletives.
One of Sullivan’s priorities during the Afghanistan decision-making process was to prevent leaks. In a White House that hardly ever spoke without permission, Sullivan wanted to place this decision in an impenetrable lockbox. Yet, word had gotten out. Someone — and he wasn’t pointing fingers — had told a reporter at Vox about the Oval Office debates. The piece contained details about how Milley was making a passionate case for staying. And it was obvious that leak hadn’t come from Milley, since it described his arguments as lacking substance.
Now comes the concern about the women and girls of Afghanistan.
This prescient concern was raised not by Biden, nor by Jake Sullivan and his national security team in the White House basement, nor by anyone else in the Biden Cabinet. It was raised by the nation’s senior soldier, Army General Mark Milley. And it was the leak about Milley’s opinion, if not stemming from Milley himself, which Sullivan could not bear to read about in Vox (probably Milley’s comment in this Vox post.)
But the [Sullivan] obsession with process risked rendering the debate about Afghanistan soulless. It was the warrior Milley who interjected his fears about about the fate of women and girls if the Taliban returned to power, But that concern was only tangential to the four questions that Biden had asked his aides to consider. Biden hadn’t just grown disillusioned with the war; he had turned against the whole project of nation building, with its emphasis on implanting the foundations for liberal democracy in Afghanistan. In George Packer’s biography of the late [top-drawer American diplomat] Richard Holbrooke, there’s a moment in 2010 when Biden vents, “[I am] not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights, it just won’t work, that’s not what they are there for.”
In the course of the 2020 campaign, CBS’s Margaret Brennan asked Biden if he felt any responsibility for what might follow the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. He brought his forefinger to his thumb. In an irritated voice, he told her, “Zero responsibility.”
Don’t believe me, nor Margaret Brennan, nor CBS? Then read the Face The Nation transcript right here, from February 2020.
My fellow Democrats in the stick-with-Joe blind-to-polling elite, you can run Joe Biden for reëlection in 2024 with that record on women. But without me.
The Moderate Democrat cannot support his ham-handed decisions on Afghanistan nor these views on women. There was a better way to withdraw, and a better way to respect women. If you call what Joe said was in any way “respect” at all.