It is almost surely the case that President Joe Biden’s Afghan withdrawal was propelled by political considerations rather than any pressing moral or foreign-policy imperative. Biden, who for 20 years has taken whatever the most popular position happened to be on Afghanistan (so, all of them), believed he could get a quick, much-needed political victory.
You can still witness the cynical polling-centric takes from Biden defenders like MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who only this morning, a few hours before American troops were being murdered by suicide bombers at the Kabul airport, was telling his co-host Mika Brzezinski, “As you look at those numbers and you look at the numbers right now, post-Afghan chaos, look at the numbers beforehand, 75 percent of Americans supporting it.” Later in the show, Jonathan Lemire, White House correspondent for the Associated Press, noted that “eventually, maybe not right away, eventually Americans will even give him credit for being the U.S. president that was able to finally end the war, something his predecessors were not able to do.”
