Joe Biden, never one for subtlety or secrecy, has been known since his veep days as this Capitol city’s most outspoken insider who wanted in the worst way to end America’s un-won and unwinnable war in Afghanistan.
And that is just what he has done. President Biden decisively ended America’s military role in Afghanistan this past week – but he did it in the worst way.
And he did it with the whole world watching. Biden, who recently promised we’d never see a panic scene like those people clamoring to get on the last chopper off the Saigon embassy roof, just watched on TV as we did.
Today Biden and his closest advisers want you to know they were shocked – shocked! – when their Afghan allies simply stole away, in 11 days in August, with all the U.S. money they could steal. And that the Afghan military, seeing that, walked away. Some got Taliban payoffs; most got Taliban safe conduct – and gifted the Taliban with the aircraft, weapons, vehicles and info-packed computers they’d gotten from us.
But wait: All year (much longer, really) Washington’s policymakers and policy-massagers had been getting very specific intelligence reports from Afghanistan’s war zones detailing devastating deterioration, demoralization and corrosive corruption within the never-really-combat-ready Afghan military.