With a gaggle of House ‘moderates’, led by the meddling Josh Gottheimer, now trying to strong-arm Nancy Pelosi into decoupling the long-linked infrastructure bills, I’m reminded of a night back in 2010. Republicans made Democrats wait some six months to seat Al Franken after he defeated Norm Coleman in Minnesota in 2008. That finally gave them 60 votes in the Senate, enough to pass what we now know as Obamacare. But now it’s January 19th, 2010. Long-serving Senator Ted Kennedy died the previous August and now there’s a special election to fill his seat. Shockingly, the race is called for Republican Scott Brown. Out of the blue, Republicans have won back their ability to filibuster Obamacare just as its near the negotiation finish line.
Fuck.
We expected folks like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to offer jailed insurrectionists the victim card. They staged a photo-op protest at the jail where some of them are being held last month to paint the rioters as mistreated political prisoners.
Now Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is joining the whitewashing movement.
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The government of Afghanistan, created under US auspices and propped up by the US military for almost two decades, appears to be collapsing under a rapid military onslaught by the Taliban. This has been triggered by but I think by no means caused by President Biden’s decision to withdraw all US military forces from the country.
Let me share a few thoughts about this in no particular order.
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Yesterday I wrote this: “In the coming days or weeks we’re likely to see a situation in which the government only controls Kabul. If you’re in the Afghan army how hard are you going to fight in that final battle? Why fight? The question answers itself.”
As we can see this morning, not days or weeks but hours. Overnight in the United States the army and government of Afghanistan melted away and remaining authorities are in the process of turning over power to a transitional Taliban government. It’s over.
People are lining up to say that this is all on Joe Biden, that he “lost” Afghanistan, that he mismanaged or failed to manage the US withdrawal, that this is “on him.” In the calculus of US military-political culture that’s likely right. But I see it quite differently. This seems to me like the ultimate vindication of his decision.
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) has a statement out that is at least semi-critical of the Biden administration’s handling of Afghanistan. I’ll print the whole thing below. But it’s this statement that caught my eye: “We also need to determine what intelligence failures led to underestimating the ease and speed of the Taliban’s advancement and work to ensure that we prevent Afghanistan from once again becoming a safe haven for terrorists.”
I think this is right. From TPM Reader JB …
Just a note here about the ongoing US bugout from Afghanistan, that I suspect we’ll hear more about in the months to come.
President Biden has a long memory; the events of 2009-10, when then-President Obama was jammed by the military leadership into what proved to be an aimless, futile surge of US forces into Afghanistan, have to be a major factor in his thinking. A more deliberate, better planned withdrawal would have been preferable to what we are seeing now in many respects — notably, to get more of America’s Afghan friends out of the country.
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Americans, or at least the commentating classes, are watching aghast as events unfold in Afghanistan. Some are second-guessing the wisdom of withdrawal – after all, how hard is it to maintain a few thousand soldiers there permanently? Others are taking the more comfortable position of saying yes, we had to leave but this just wasn’t the right way. I must be the only person in America who is having exactly the opposite reaction. The more I see the more I’m convinced this was the right decision – both what I see on the ground in Afghanistan and perhaps even more the reaction here in the United States.
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If you weren’t around over the weekend I did a series of posts on the unfolding situation in Afghanistan. In succession, “A Few Thoughts on Afghanistan,” “Vindication and the Fall of Kabul,” “After Sunday It’s Even More Clear Biden Was Right.” The titles give you the gist of my views: for all the chaos and horror, the rapidity of the collapse not only of the Afghan military but the Afghan state itself made me even more convinced the decision to leave was correct and more impressed that Biden had the courage to do it.
Biden is speaking to the American public this afternoon about the unfolding situation. It is the correct decision to do so. I think the entirety of what he needs to do is not second-guess the decision or chase after the emotions or hyperbole of the moment. The most important reason not to do that is that the decision was and is the correct one. But equivocation signals weakness. At a moment of uncertainty and chaotic images, the most important thing a leader can do is to be clear that he has a plan, that it is the right plan, and that because it is the right plan he will stick to that plan regardless of the political consequences and even if it is painful to do so.
The Republican Party wants you to forget that just a few months ago the GOP agreed that the move to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, which Biden is now being criticized for, was sound foreign policy.
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If nothing else for media watchers there’s a fascinating dynamic developing over the last day or so in trying to define the US exit from Afghanistan. It’s not a new dynamic. In fact, it’s one I first saw a quarter century ago when DC’s establishment press got really, really upset that not only Bill Clinton but more importantly most of the country didn’t agree with their take on impeachment in 1998. Official DC was baffled when Democrats actually managed to pick up a few seats in the 1998 midterm that was entirely about impeachment. The specifics of the case are of course pretty radically different. But the dynamic of establishment DC press escalation is not. Politico’s morning newsletter this morning captures the dynamic. It starts quoting David Axelrod making clear that Biden messed up and has to admit he messed up but then notes that Biden didn’t get the message and said he had made the right decision. A sort of primal scream of “WTF, JOE BIDEN?!?!?!!?!” virtually bleeds through the copy.