There is a master’s thesis in the Beltway foreign policy set’s criticism of President Joe Biden’s completing the Afghanistan withdrawal this week. The sunk cost fallacy and war fighting has been studied to death. But after 20 years of the shifting U.S. mission in Afghanistan, some master’s candidate will take it up again.
Withdrawal was set in motion last year by Biden’s predecessor. Biden could either pull the plug or double down with another surge like the one he opposed as vice president. He did what others would not. Biden finished it with a historic airlift.
Nonetheless, the press is in on the pile-on. I grabbed just a couple of headlines on Tuesday:
But people with more skin in the game than professional reputations, advertising to sell, and political axes to grind reacted differently. The American people were ready to leave Afghanistan if very serious people were not.
David Rothkopf’s has been a clear-eyed voice among the flurry of criticisms from armchair generals. He writes in The Atlantic:
Despite the criticism, Biden, who had argued unsuccessfully when he was Barack Obama’s vice president to seriously reduce America’s presence in Afghanistan, remained resolute. Rather than view the heartbreaking scenes in Afghanistan in a political light as his opponents did, Biden effectively said, “Politics be damned—we’re going to do what’s right” and ordered his team to stick with the deadline and find a way to make the best of the difficult situation in Kabul.
Jon Soltz, chairman of VoteVets, posted a thread Tuesday strongly in support of Biden’s decision.
But Biden can speak for himself. And with conviction and without equivocation, he did.