JOE BIDEN may have more foreign-policy experience than any American president in 30 years, but he is haunted by the brutal assessment of his judgment by Robert Gates, who was secretary of defence under the president both men served, Barack Obama. Mr Gates called Mr Biden “a man of integrity” whom it was impossible not to like. Yet, writing in “Duty”, his memoir, he added: “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades.”
It is too soon to know whether history will add Mr Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan to a list of calls that includes support for the war in Iraq and opposition to the raid to kill Osama bin Laden. But in the short term the abandonment of Afghanistan to Taliban rule after nearly 20 years of American commitment—the images of Afghans clinging to departing jets and then falling to their deaths, the stench of great-power humiliation that recalled the evacuation of Saigon in 1975—mocks Mr Biden’s claims that “America is back”; that conviction in democracy and compassion for the oppressed have a place beside self-interest at the centre of his foreign policy; and that at least, after four years of buffoonery, American leadership is once again competent.
Under withering bipartisan criticism for the first time in his presidency, Mr Biden staunchly defended his decision in an address to the nation on August 16th. Although he said “the buck stops with me”, he reserved plenty of blame for his predecessor, Donald Trump, saying that reneging on a peace deal agreed with the Taliban by Mr Trump would have trapped American soldiers once again in an escalating conflict.
President Biden also blamed Afghan leaders who “gave up and fled” and Afghan security forces who did not fight. The velocity of the collapse, he said, showed he had made the right decision. “American troops cannot, and should not, be fighting in a war, and dying in a war, that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves,” he said. In essence, he argued the Afghans failed their American allies, rather than the other way around. He was the fourth president to preside over this war, he said, and he refused to hand it on to a fifth: “How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war?”
Mr Biden claimed his team had planned for “every contingency” but acknowledged the collapse came faster than he expected. As recently as on July 8th Mr Biden had dismissed any chance that American diplomats might wind up scrambling for an exit as they did in Vietnam. “None whatsoever,” he said. “Zero.” He said the possibility of “the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely”.
Republicans, including Mr Trump, said Mr Biden had botched the exit. Mike Pompeo, Mr Trump’s secretary of state, rejected any suggestion that Mr Trump’s deal was the problem as “pathetic blame-shifting”. Yet, appearing on August 15th on “Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace”, Mr Pompeo also apportioned blame to the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, calling him more interested in accumulating American money than in talking to his own people, and he said the American armed forces had failed across two decades to train Afghan forces. Reporting by the Washington Post and others has shown the armed forces and civilian leaders misled the public throughout the war, insisting on progress that did not exist, including in training Afghan soldiers. In fact, by supplying so much combat experience, America appears to have been more effective in training Taliban fighters. Veterans are stepping forward to say they now feel their sacrifices were for nothing, a conclusion that should help force a reckoning within the armed forces, as after Vietnam. (The Economist)
