Nice try: Biden's attempt to displace blame for the Afghanistan withdrawal catastrophe

Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) in International Law, Harvard University

Only in a news environment where reporters and editors have no memory, and no understanding of the big picture in historical context, would a president try to shift the blame from himself for the greatest foreign policy catastrophe in U.S. history since before World War II.

But President Joe Biden has attempted to do just that.¹ He attempts to shift the focus from the catastrophic decision to withdraw from Afghanistan to the manner of its execution, all the while trying to blame Donald Trump for failing to leave behind detailed withdrawal plans.

It won’t wash.

John F.Kennedy, Jr. at least had the character to accept responsibility for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. He didn’t try to blame President Dwight Eisenhower.

To be sure, Trump’s agreement with the Taliban of February 29, 2020, in which he agreed to withdraw all American troops from the country in exchange for figleaf promises that amounted to essentially nothing, was a huge foreign policy blunder. Moreover, it appears that Trump’s principal motivation in reaching the agreement was to win an advantage in the 2020 presidential election.

But it was Biden who assumed power on January 20, 2021, and it was Biden who three months letter made the decision to withdraw all U.S. forces and contractors from Afghanistan.

Trump negotiated the February 2020 withdrawal agreement over the heads of the democratically-elected government of Ashraf Ghani. Biden reached his decision without taking theAfghan government’s interests into account and their participation in the talks, or the blatant violation by the Taliban of the February 2020 agreement with Trump.

Let us be clear. Biden’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces and contractors from Afghanistan doomed the Afghan government to collapse. For without the U.S. contractors, the Afghan air force could not fly, and without air support the Afghan army could not defeat the Taliban on the battlefield. And without an army that could defeat the Taliban on the battlefield, the Afghan government could not survive. Everyone knew this.

Biden’s betrayal of the Afghan government is revealed by his argument that he was greatly surprised by the fact that the Afghan government fell so quickly., not by the fact that it collapsed. Everyone knew it would fall. And he is disingenuous in the extreme in saying the U.S. had met its original objectives in Afghanistan, ignoring the fact that U.S. objectives had changed, and had been expressed in solemn agreements with its NATO and ISAF partners in the military coalition which fought the Taliban for over 20 years, and with the United Nations and foreign assistance agencies with which it joined in trying to build up a strong Afghan government which could stand up to the Taliban.

Beyond the fateful decision to withdraw, announced on April 6, which meant the Afghan government would inevitably fall, Biden goes on to slander the good men and women of the Afghan army, which lost some 67,000 killed during the war. And went on to slander Afghan president Asraf Ghani for fleeing the country after his army had collapsed. Because of the U.S. withdrawal decision and its implementation.

Indeed, one of the most sordid aspects of this despicable withdrawal and attempts to justify it has been the slanderous attacks on the army and the government of Afghanistan. There was a lot of corruption in Afghanistan, much of it fostered by the CIA which reportedly had virtually every government minister on its payroll, and as far back as 2005 was reportedly delivering millions of dollars in cash to President Hamid Karzai’s presidential palace each week.

Nonetheless, 67,000 Afghan soldiers fought, often with great courage, and died for their country and the democratic project which the government represented

The closer the actual events and decisions in this fiasco are examined, the more the incompetence of President Biden and his foreign policy team come to light.

The context is important. Vladimir Putin was massing troops on the Ukraine border and threatening to invade the country in March 2021. On April 6 Biden announced his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and, whether by coincidence or not, Putin also in April announced that he was standing down his forces on the border of Ukraine.

In June Biden met Putin at a summit in Geneva. In August the debacle of the actual withdrawal from Kabul took place. Bagram air base had been evacuated earlier, and not even handed over to the Afghan army.

By October if not before, Biden was broadcasting to the world that if Russia invaded Ukraine, NATO would not use force in response.

In December, January, and part of February, Putin went through the motions of seeking a negotiated solution of the Ukraine crisis. Yet from his demands and the terms of a potential “agreement” he proposed, it seemed clear that he had already decided to launch a large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Joe Biden and other leaders failed utterly in their attempts to dissuade Putin from undertaking the invasion, which began on February 24, 2022.

Historical truth is in the details.

Biden’s attempt to displace blame for his catastrophic decision to withdraw from Afghanistan will only feed interest in finding out what really happened in U.S. decision-making circles and on the ground in Afghanistan.

Biden shows no regrets over his catastrophic withdrawal decision² and gives no evidence of having learned anything from the debacle.

Moreover, he seeks to avoid responsibility for his decisions and their consequences by blaming Trump and the Afghan army and government, greatly misrepresenting the truth in the narratives he has offered.

This is not the first time he has distorted the truth. Yet this time he has utterly destroyed any presumption that the White House is telling the truth. That loss of credibility is a natural result of his current attempt to whitewash what happened when he decided to withdraw from Afghanistan.³

Biden might have avoided a long and drawn out debate in the U.S. over his responsibility for the Afghanistan catastrophe, if he had admitted some mistakes and brought in strong and seasoned people to replace Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan and to build a new foreign policy team that would not repeat the mistakes of the past.

He did not do this. It is likely that the Republicans in the House will keep the debate⁴ alive.

The judgments of historians, when they come, are likely to be extremely harsh.

1. See

1) Andrew Restuccia and Sabrina Siddiqui,”In Afghanistan Report, White House Blames Donald Trump for Lack of Planning; Biden administration gives Congress access to after-action reports on chaotic U.S. withdrawal,” Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2023 (updated at 4:28 pm ET);

2. See,

1)Editorial, “Joe Biden Isn’t Sorry About His Afghanistan Withdrawal
A White House report on the chaotic retreat spins disaster as triumph, Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2023; (6:51 pm ET);

2)”DEFEAT IS VICTORY! Propaganda replaces policy in the Biden administration,” The Trenchant Observer, August 31, 2021.

3. For a contemporaneous report on what really happened in reaching the Afghanistan withdrawal decision, see,

1) Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger, “Debating Exit From Afghanistan, Biden Rejected Generals’ Views; Over two decades of war, the Pentagon had fended off the political instincts of elected leaders frustrated with the grind of Afghanistan. But President Biden refused to be persuaded,” New YorkTimes, April 17, 2021 (updated April 23,2021;

2) Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Joe Biden is deaf, dumb and blind to the chaos the US has
unleashed; The administration is ignoring history by putting blind faith in the goodwill of the murderous Taliban,” The Telegraph, August 28, 2021 (9:30 p.m.).

4. See,

1)”The Media: Debates on Afghanistan are as if it were in another time, on another planet,” The Trenchant Observer, August 21, 2023.

2) “The Big Picture: President Biden's Decision to Withdraw from Afghanistan,” The Trenchant Observer,, August 20, 2021 (originally published in Foreign Policy Decisions, April 18, 2021).

3)See “Joe Biden, Captain of the Titanic, which just hit the iceberg of Afghanistan,” The Trenchant Observer, August 25, 2021.