Headline Roundup • August 26th, 2021
Perspectives: Biden's Afghan Evacuation Strategy
Summary from the AllSides News Team
As evacuations continued this week for Americans and vulnerable Afghans out of Kabul, the conversation about Afghanistan shifted from the troop withdrawal itself to the Biden administration’s strategy for evacuation and withdrawal. Thursday’s suicide bombings, which killed at least 13 American soldiers and dozens of Afghans, added greater intensity to the debate. President Joe Biden once again defended the withdrawal on Thursday, telling reporters that he would not be deterred by terrorist attacks. Biden reaffirmed his commitment to evacuating all Americans who sought evacuation by Aug. 31 and said that evacuation efforts would continue for remaining Americans and vulnerable Afghans even after American troops left the country.
Voices in left-rated outlets were mixed, including writers who criticized the withdrawal, called for others not to politicize Afghans’ suffering, said the chaotic withdrawal was inevitable, and pointed to America’s 20-year military presence itself as the issue. Voices in right-rated outlets were broadly critical of the evacuation strategy and of President Joe Biden specifically, including writers who said Biden was incompetent, criticized the military’s coordination with the Taliban to provide security, called out a purported “kill list” of names given to the Taliban to facilitate airport access, and accused Biden of abandoning Americans.
Featured Coverage of this Story
Bryan Denton for The New York Times
In 2005, my colleagues at The American Prospect, Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias, wrote an essay I think about often. It was called “The Incompetence Dodge,” and it argued that American policymakers and pundits routinely try to rescue the reputation of bad ideas by attributing their failure to poor execution. At the time, they were writing about the liberal hawks who were blaming the catastrophe of the Iraq war on the Bush administration’s maladministration rather than rethinking the enterprise in its totality. But the same dynamic suffuses the recriminations over...
Leah Millis/Reuters
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,...
The Biden administration could certainly have better planned the extraction of civilians from Afghanistan. Yet media and politicians portray the fall of Afghanistan as a broader strategic debacle for U.S. foreign policy and President Joe Biden. They say America’s abandonment of the elected government in Kabul undermines U.S. efforts to support democracy elsewhere; harms U.S. alliance commitments; will be a boon for terrorists, and is likely to result in massive human rights violations.
These criticisms exaggerate the fallout. Responsibility for the current mess does not lie primarily with those who decided to face the reality of an...
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