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August 25th, 2021 
Awake Goy As we count down the last days of the American occupation of Afghanistan, the mainstream media have largely adopted a pro-war narrative of “catastrophe”: the U.S. should have stayed longer, Biden’s withdrawal is precipitous, the president has failed to secure all the good things that America brought to the people of Afghanistan/Kabul.
The heartrending scenes from the Kabul airport are of course the backdrop to their critique of Biden’s supposed incompetence.
On the other hand, Biden has gotten surprising support from the left, which has long opposed the Afghanistan occupation, and from a few independent voices who have said that the 20-year war was extremely violent and the chaotic scenes at the airport are merely the last chapter in a misbegotten policy.
Let’s go first to the Catastrophe narrative. The New York Times has savaged Biden in several articles, chief among them a long largely speculative “news” article on Sunday bearing a bunch of bylines about how Biden’s mishandling of the Afghanistan withdrawal has undermined his entire presidency.
With President Biden facing a political crisis that has shaken his standing in his party, Democrats across the country are increasingly worried about their ability to maintain power in Washington, as his administration struggles to defend its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan…
While Americans watched devastating scenes of mayhem at the Kabul airport and ascendant Taliban forces last week, the steady drumbeat of bipartisan criticism left many Democrats frustrated and dismayed at a White House they viewed as having fumbled the end of the country’s longest war on multiple fronts…
many of the president’s allies fear he will lose the confidence of the moderate swing voters who lifted his party to victory in 2020.
It goes on like that for a while!
Another long news piece in the Times is based on the scenes of mayhem. It says that the U.S. withdrawal was “too precipitous” and tallies human/geopolitical casualties of that terrible mistake.
Every death at the Kabul airport, every child with a teddy-bear backpack separated from a parent, every Afghan supporter of the United States who is marooned, reinforces the impression of an unplanned United States withdrawal that was too precipitous and based on a disastrous misjudgment of the capacities of the American- and NATO-trained government military forces. They simply melted away.
in a moment, with scarcely a shot fired, Afghanistan was lost, the Taliban entered Kabul and the white flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was hoisted.
Another analysis in the Times says that the Trump/Biden deal with the Taliban was a failure for a war that brought “tangible improvements” to Afghanistan.
The deal the Trump administration struck did not enshrine rights for women, nor guarantee that any of the gains the United States had spent so many years, and lives, trying to instill would be preserved…
In short, much that the United States tried to put in place is already at risk of being erased.
There is little sense in this article that the Taliban’s endurance, and the U.S. defeat, arose from widespread Afghan opposition to a corrupt regime propped up by an American occupation that brought war to the countryside.
We should have been occupiers forever, says a Times op-ed by Ryan Crocker, former ambassador to Afghanistan under Obama. Crockers criticizes Biden for lacking “strategic patience” and says that “impatience” has produced “the American disaster in Afghanistan.”
Mr. Biden’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces destroyed an affordable status quo that could have lasted indefinitely at a minimum cost in blood and treasure.
In another Times op-ed historian Michael Kazin suggests that Biden is as politically responsible for the debacle as Lyndon Johnson was for the fateful escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965! We can be grateful that Kazin at least includes a counter-narrative of Biden as a profile in courage who ended a mission “doomed from the start:”
As Mr. Biden mentioned in his address to the nation on Monday, as vice president, he opposed the troop surge ordered by Barack Obama in 2009….
As the public’s attention shifts away from Afghanistan, Mr. Biden’s decision may seem less like a failure and more like a sober, even necessary end to a policy that was doomed from the start.
The liberal cable stations are as upset about the withdrawal as the New York Times. Jake Tapper ran a report on CNN yesterday saying that Afghanistan could become a “haven” for terrorists; Al Qaeda and Isil pose a “tremendous threat” that the U.S. has failed to appreciate.
Tapper said the Taliban are freeing terrorists from Afghan prisons. So did Jim Sciutto of CNN, tweeting a picture of men behind bars:
Hanging on my office wall: Al Qaeda fighters imprisoned in northern Afghanistan after the US invasion. One of them smiled as he told me he’d kill Americans. Disturbing to see these prisons now emptied.
Josh Rogin of the Washington Post also jumps on to the Al Qaeda angle:
The Taliban takeover is the biggest boost to Al Qaeda since 9/11 and a global game changer for jihadism generally…
Rogin promotes a dubious piece in the New Yorker about the incipient threat of terrorism from Afghanistan. Robin Wright’s principal source is Rita Katz, the head of a thinktank that tracks “jihadists” and has fed information to U.S. government intelligence agencies. By the way, Katz formerly worked for Steven Emerson, served in the Israeli army, and her family left Iraq for Israel after the 1967 war. Another Wright source is Bruce Hoffman, an intelligence analyst with his own pro-Israel dossier. Wright’s argument has an apocalyptic flavor.
There is a “universal recognition” that Al Qaeda can now “reinvest” in Afghanistan as a safe haven, Katz said. Jihadism effectively has a new homeland, the first since the collapse of the isis caliphate in March, 2019. ..
For more than a year, both the Trump and Biden Administrations had reams of warnings—from the military and diplomats, congressional reports and a commissioned study group, its own inspector general, and the United Nations—that the collapse of the Afghan government, an ever-growing possibility, would also mean a resurgence of Al Qaeda.
Now let’s move to the counter-narrative.
John Harwood of CNN has provided support to the Biden administration by stressing the relative bloodlessness of the American withdrawal:
a week ago, after Afghan govt/security forces left control of their country to a brutal enemy, TV cameras captured harrowing images of chaos, panic and desperation since then, US troops have overseen evacuation of more than 50,000 people without suffering any reported casualties.
Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post also says that pro-war voices are purveying a fantasy about a “catastrophic war.”
When Petraeus or Panetta tut-tut about the the Biden team, remember they either deliberately spun a false narrative or were utterly clueless. Of course they want us to belief that a tidier exit from a catastrophic war was possible.
Catastrophe is also a theme of Michael Tracey’s piece at Substack accusing the media of a “Massive Propaganda Onslaught” that ignores the horrors of the 20-year occupation.
Why wasn’t it declared “catastrophic” when the war was escalated by presidents of both parties… Why is it only a “catastrophe” when the underlying policy — a failure of epic proportions — is belatedly terminated?..
Why isn’t having engaged in this intervention for so long, despite full knowledge of its foundational lunacy, what harms American “credibility” or undercuts its “reputation”? Why is the withdrawal — but not the war itself — provoking such sustained shrieks of “catastrophe”? You’re suddenly outraged about the precise operational details of US policy in Afghanistan… but only as it pertains to the long-delayed evacuation mission?
Biden is also getting support from several writers on the left.
Jeet Heer at Substack emphasizes the tremendous human cost of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.
Where I would defend Biden is on the core decision. I do so in part because the criticisms made of Biden by the national security establishment are based on a denial of how badly the war had been going and the suffering endured not just by the United States military but also, on a much larger scale, by the Afghan people.
Heer posts a chart from The Economist showing that during 20 years of war, about 250,000 Afghans have died.
Biden also gets support from Juan Cole, who decries the “press pillorying” the president and says that Biden has been concise and convincing in explaining his decisions.
I have been a critic of U.S. Afghanistan policy through several administrations, but I have to say I found Biden’s reasoning here to be iron tight.
Cole says Biden’s critics want endless war. Obama knew the war was unwinnable ten years ago and failed to do the courageous, honorable thing.
The only way to have stayed, Biden is saying, would have been to do a big troop escalation and fight the Afghanistan War all over again.
Biden had seen the Pentagon and people like Petraeus snooker Barack Obama into doing just that, and Biden had been against it in 2010-2011, as I pointed out on Tuesday. So he was certainly not going to fall for that one again…
Jeffrey Sachs also has a piece on the folly of the warmakers and interventionists and their media cheerleaders.
Underlying all of them [Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan] is the US foreign-policy establishment’s belief that the solution to every political challenge is military intervention or CIA-backed destabilization.
That belief speaks to the US foreign-policy elite’s utter disregard of other countries’ desire to escape grinding poverty…
In the aftermath of the fall of Kabul, the US mass media is, predictably, blaming the US failure on Afghanistan’s incorrigible corruption. The lack of American self-awareness is startling.
I’d note that while NPR has been softballing the warmakers, too– Afghanistan is this century’s “Dunkirk moment,” in which we abandon our friends — it has twice interviewed John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, who has repeatedly questioned the U.S. mission there.
“We have serious problems of going into a country and not understanding the culture and the makeup of that country,” Sopko told NPR on August 15. “We’ve been shining a light on it in multiple reports going back to when I started [in 2012] about changing metrics, about ghosts, ghost soldiers who didn’t exist, about poor logistics, about the fact that the Afghans couldn’t sustain what we were giving them. So these reports have come out.”
NPR also interviewed Sopko on August 17 on the pointlessness of the war:
I don’t know how many generals I heard who have talked about – we were turning the corner. We turned the corner so many times we looked like a top just spinning out of control. And that was a major problem also. We didn’t really fess up to the American people and to the Congress these particular problems…
There’s a tendency after failures like this or Vietnam to sweep it under the rug and say, we’re never going to do it again. Well, after Vietnam, we eliminated a lot of the capabilities to carry out counterinsurgencies and to try to develop countries. And guess what? We did do it again. We did it in Iraq. We did it in Afghanistan.
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