Source: Dari Panama
Having read a few insta-reactions to the Afghanistan situation from such folks as Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, Erick Erickson, Kevin Drum, and Andrew Sullivan, in terms of analysis I’m finding that defending President Biden’s decision is, interestingly, far easier than it is to condemn it.
Let’s start with metrics. The various commentators are trying to measure different things without sometimes understanding the problem of separating one from the other, while others do. Erickson wants to condemn Biden for the pullout but not the termination of the war, while Rubin and Boot, on different sides of this issue, are not nearly so clear.
If we take these separately it may become more clear. Insofar as the war itself goes, Biden has been against this war for a long time, and this is well-known. He did not accept the military’s official evaluations of the war, and as the war dragged on for an unprecedented 20+ years, it’s become more and more clear that he is right. The publication of The Afghanistan Papers more or less put an exclamation point on the matter.
To his credit, he followed through on his judgment. And I think we’ve waited long enough – twenty years – to pass judgment on the conflict.
The second point, his decisions regarding the actual withdrawal, requires more time for appropriate appraisal. When I see someone like Erickson crying out that Biden should resign in disgrace, I read his justification and shake my head – because the judgments are on points that are not yet clear. Indeed, exactly on what grounds he calls for resignation isn’t clear. In simple fact, such a call recalls Trumpian projection: Many people called for my [Trump’s] resignation, therefore we’ll paint Biden with the same calls and make it a moral equivalence.
Look: an approach often used in technical fields for measuring success or failure is to define a measurement that would indicate complete success, and then ask what a comparison with a real world measurement tells you. And I’m having some real trouble coming up with that ideal measurement. What does it mean to have a well-run withdrawal in the real world?
After a while, I have to ask: Are we seeing it right now?
Boot thinks it’s a disaster, yet every point he raises in his article I thought dubious. For example, We could have disregarded Trump’s agreement with the Taliban and stayed on without further losses. Well, no. Abstractly, people make decisions based off current status and expected events. Concretely, the Taliban have fought for nearly twenty years, at the time, when they got the Trump agreement which would hand them the country on a platter. Why launch more attacks and endanger the prize? Trump’s a chump, a demonstrated fact, so let him remain a Trump and have the prize drop into our laps. Boot’s point evaporates.
Erickson wants to hide behind an alleged claim that we should have withdrawn during the Afghanistan planting season, not the fighting season, and then the collapse of the Afghan Army wouldn’t have happened. The problem is that Afghanistan is a huge prize, and the Trump agreement enriched Taliban fighting forces with roughly 5000 previously imprisoned fighters. But the Taliban had already secured the mass defection of Afghan forces; the fact that the former Afghan President jetted on out of Kabul within days convinces me that the defection was well-known within Afghanistan, and possibly by American forces and key American politicians as well.
Erickson, because he made the mistake of taking Limbaugh’s radio chair and must accede to his ready-made audience’s demands, has to be completely invested in the idea that Biden is as bad, or worse, than former President Trump, and he thinks this is the chance. But if he can’t make a convincing point, it’s really a disaster for him.
The other points I’ve seen made in support of Biden’s condemnation are similarly weak. They can be, with varying amounts of thought, either completely discredited, or at least be unproven as of yet. I shan’t cover them because of time considerations.
To the extent that it matters what my opinion might be on Biden’s decision, I’m going out on a limb as I make public my premature – thoroughly premature – opinion and suggest that this event, so thoroughly condemned by the right and a matter of concern – rightly – to the independents, center, and the left, may become, in the eyes of non-partisan historians, if not the right, a signature decision, an important course correction to the American polity, and one of finest … not accomplishments … but decisions taken by President Biden.
But assessments of how well we evacuate Americans and Afghan allies that are in distress will affect that determination. I think anyone who’s already decided on their assessment of this Biden decision is merely a partisan, and possibly a hack, unless they back off and admit it:
We’re not ready to make this judgment just yet.
Everything’s connected, Mr. Boot.
