Judd Legum’s newsletter asks an important question:
Yesterday’s newsletter detailed how the media is largely overlooking voices that supported Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. Instead media reports are almost exclusively highlighting criticism of the withdrawal — often from people complicit in two decades of failed policy in Afghanistan.
We have reason to believe that this is not an accident. On Wednesday, Popular Information spoke to a veteran communications professional who has been trying to place prominent voices supportive of the withdrawal on television and in print. The source said that it has been next to impossible:
I’ve been in political media for over two decades, and I have never experienced something like this before. Not only can I not get people booked on shows, but I can’t even get TV bookers who frequently book my guests to give me a call back…
I’ve fed sources to reporters, who end up not quoting the sources, but do quote multiple voices who are critical of the president and/or put the withdrawal in a negative light.
I turn on TV and watch CNN and, frankly, a lot of MSNBC shows, and they’re presenting it as if there’s not a voice out there willing to defend the president and his decision to withdraw. But I offered those very shows those voices, and the shows purposely decided to shut them out.
In so many ways this feels like Iraq and 2003 all over again. The media has coalesced around a narrative, and any threat to that narrative needs to be shut out.
Who is on TV? As Media Matters has documented, there are plenty of former Bush administration officials criticizing the withdrawal.
Is it really about execution?
Much of the criticism of Biden’s decision to withdraw has focused on the administration’s “execution.” The critics claim the withdrawal was poorly planned, chaotic, and unnecessarily put Americans — and their Afghan allies — in danger.
Some of these claims may be true. It’s hard to know, for example, how many people have been left behind since evacuations are ongoing. But, with a few exceptions, the criticisms of Biden’s execution are being made by people who opposed withdrawal altogether.
For example, in a scathing column published in the Washington Post, former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice criticizes the execution of the withdrawal. But she also makes clear that she does not think the U.S. military should have left.
Twenty years was not enough to complete a journey from the 7th-century rule of the Taliban and a 30-year civil war to a stable government. Twenty years may also not have been enough to consolidate our gains against terrorism and assure our own safety. We — and they — needed more time.
Rice’s argument for why the withdrawal was executed poorly is very similar. She says that waiting a few more months, until winter, would have made it more difficult for the Taliban to fight and “given the Afghans a little more time to develop a strategy to prevent the chaotic fall of Kabul.”
But Rice’s argument makes clear that it is impossible to disentangle the execution of the withdrawal with the broader policy failures of the last two decades. It may be more difficult for the Taliban to fight in the winter, but the Taliban did not need to fight. Afghan security forces simply evaporated.
The twenty-year effort to build up these institutions — touted by Rice and much of the national security establishment — was a total failure. An orderly evacuation would require some period of time between the end of U.S. military operations and the collapse of the Afghan security forces. What has transpired over the last week demonstrated that wasn’t possible.
Absent functional Afghan institutions, it’s up to the U.S. military to facilitate an evacuation. That is largely what happened. Thousands of U.S. troops are in Afghanistan securing the Kabul airport and trying to get people out of the country.
Was the status quo sustainable?
Another argument, advanced by former UK official Rory Stewart in the Washington Post, is that the U.S. military footprint was quite small and should have been retained indefinitely:
You would be forgiven for thinking the U.S. was getting itself out of another Vietnam War: fantastically dangerous and expensive, achieving nothing, and impossible to sustain. But in truth, U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan formally ended in 2014; troop levels had decreased to about 2,500; and there have been no American combat fatalities since February 2020.
When he became president, Biden took over a relatively low-cost, low-risk presence in Afghanistan that was nevertheless capable of protecting the achievements of the previous 20 years.
What Stewart ignores is that the low levels of violence in recent months coincided with the Trump administration’s announcement that the U.S. military presence would end in 2021. If, instead, the Biden administration announced that it was staying indefinitely, the situation could have changed dramatically.
The small U.S. military footprint also came with a high cost to Afghan civilians. With few troops on the ground, the military increasingly relied on air power to keep the Taliban at bay. This kept U.S. fatalities low but resulted in a massive increase in civilian casualties. A Brown University study found that between 2016 and 2019 the “number of civilians killed by international airstrikes increased about 330 percent.” In October 2020 “212 civilians were killed.”
Joe Biden is taking a tremendous beating in the press from all sides. It’s as if five years of pent-up discomfort over having to criticize a Republican is pouring out in intense relief against a Democrat. (I knew this was coming as I wrote many times. It’s just how this stuff works.)
Eric Boehlert’s Press Run had this on the subject this morning:
Feigning shock that the final chapter to a 20-year lost war in Afghanistan did not go as planned for the U.S. military, the media remain in overdrive, breathlessly presenting the U.S. troop withdrawal as a presidency-defining failure for Joe Biden.
Thankfully, the dire picture that the press painted over the weekend of the widespread death and destruction that the Taliban would soon unleash on Kabul has not materialized. Instead, the controversial U.S. evacuation has become more orderly and efficient, which is why cable news has pulled back on the story — CNN mentioned “Afghanistan” 30 percent fewer times on Wednesday as compared to Monday, according to TVeyes.com.
Commenting on Biden’s Monday address to the nation and the cultural disconnect between the public and the press, MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace observed, “”95% of the American people will agree with everything [President Biden] just said. 95% of the press covering this White House will disagree.”
The question is, why? Why is there such a chasm between the public and the press. (Prior to the withdrawal, Americans overwhelmingly supported Biden’s plan to bring U.S. troops home.) Why has the Beltway media covered the Afghanistan story with an unrestrained frenzy that so far outweighs the facts in play?
Laser focused on blaming Biden for a military defeat two decades in the making, while wildly overplaying the evacuation story in terms of historical context, the press seems genuinely eager to echo GOP spin and denounce the White House, as well as demand weird public acts of contrition.
Anxious to prove they’re not part of the “liberal media bias” problem, the media are always on the lookout for ways to make that case. “The media will never admit it, but they’ve been waiting for an opportunity to harshly go after Biden to prove anew how “balanced” they are.
“See, it’s not just Trump!”” observed author Larry Sabato. (Yes, Politico called Biden’s Afghan speech on Monday “Trumpian.”) Writer Dave Roberts concurred: “Looking around, I gotta say the US political press seems practically tumescent over the opportunity to scold Biden for something, thus reestablishing its both-sides cred. It’s a frenzy out there.”
Biden is just going to have to withstand this and we’ll see how he endures. It’s part of the deal, as he well knows. There was no way that his relatively smooth honeymoon would last and this plays right into the media’s lizard brain. They love to show endless b-roll of foreigners running around in exotic locales while self-righteously proclaiming that everything has gone to hell in a handbasket.
This is the main reason why no president has withdrawn before. They all knew it would be a mess, the Taliban would take over almost immediately and there would be endless recriminations heaped upon the president who “lost Afghanistan.” It’s part of Biden’s legacy right or wrong. He seems to be YOLO on this one. It’s not something you see every day.