We all know that Joe Biden is suffering in the polls. While current polling of the presidential race basically has it as a coin flip between him and Trump, Biden's approval ratings have been under water for some time now.
Pretty much since Biden made the decision to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan.
That was an unpopular decision, but no doubt the right one. Charles A. Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations writes:
The ineffectiveness and collapse of Afghanistan’s military and governing institutions largely substantiates Biden’s skepticism that US-led efforts to prop up the government in Kabul would ever enable it to stand on its own feet. The international community has spent nearly 20 years, many thousands of lives, and trillions of dollars to do good by Afghanistan – taking down al-Qaeda; beating back the Taliban; supporting, advising, training, and equipping the Afghan military; bolstering governing institutions; and investing in the country’s civil society.
Significant progress was made, but not enough. As the Taliban’s speedy advance has revealed, even two decades of steady support failed to create Afghan institutions capable of holding their own.
That is because the mission was fatally flawed from the outset. It was a fool’s errand to try to turn Afghanistan into a centralized, unitary state. The country’s difficult topography, ethnic complexity, and tribal and local loyalties produce enduring political fragmentation. Its troubled neighborhood and hostility to outside interference make foreign intervention perilous.
Despite what it cost him in political capital, Biden deserves credit for doing the right thing. Even more so, Biden deserves credit for doing it despite knowing that it would cost him politically --- something that Bush, Trump, and even Obama weren't willing to do:
Instead, the past three administrations have equivocated, or worse. In May of 2003, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that U.S. forces had ended major combat operations in Afghanistan, a claim that he and his field commanders knew was false. In December of 2014, Barack Obama made a similar announcement, announcing that “our combat mission in Afghanistan is ending,” and “the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion.”
As Craig Whitlock, the author of “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War”, told an interviewer recently, “Of course, that wasn’t true, either. We still engaged in combat for years to come. Scores of Americans died in combat, and thousands of Afghans did. So there’s this deliberate attempt by different presidents and their administrations to reassure Americans that the war was in hand when it really wasn’t.”
No one is a fan of the Taliban; it would have been great if the U.S. could have swept them aside to make way for democracy in Afghanistan. But wishing doesn't make it so. It was a fool's errand to invade Afghanistan in the first place, and Joe Biden deserves a great deal of credit for having the courage to end it.
