As Democrats gather in Chicago this week to coordinate Kamala Harris as their presidential nominee, you won’t hear much about the chaos caused by the Biden-Harris Administration just three years ago. You won’t hear from Gold Star families who lost their loved ones or veterans who used their own money to rescue Americans left behind in Afghanistan.
The catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan by President Biden and Vice President Harris was the original sin of their administration. It was a microcosm of everything that has gone wrong over the past four years, and their leadership failures likely marked the beginning of the end for their administration
First there was the gaslighting — the urging the public not to believe its eyes about the magnitude of the collapse. Biden was relaxing at Camp David when Kabul fell, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken was vacationing at the Hamptons. Earlier in the summer, President Biden reassured the public of things that were laughably false: that Kabul would not fall and people would not be clinging to helicopters. He continued to insist the withdrawal was a success.
What made the gaslighting even worse for Biden was that it was so transparently absurd and insulting. The culmination of a terrorist attack that took the lives of 13 service members, the scenes of Afghans tragically falling from planes to their deaths and American helicopters abandoning our embassy will forever be brandished in school textbooks. The families are not going to go away. We cannot unsee the photographs
The failure in Afghanistan undercut the central narrative of Biden’s campaign: that he would provide a return to normalcy and competent governance and put the Trump Administration in the rear-view mirror. His governance was catastrophic.
There was also a horrifying moral collapse and evil visited upon the Gold Star families whose sons and daughters died in the botched withdrawal during a suicide attack at the Abbey Gate entrance to Kabul International Airport. President Biden could not help but repeatedly look at his watch during the dignified transfer ceremony held for the thirteen servicemembers who were killed during the Abbey Gate attack,
The strategic failure will be the most far reaching, unfortunately, and far outlive Biden and Harris. Bagram Air Base was the only major U.S. base strategically sandwiched between Iran, China and Russia. America simply gave away a strategic foothold that will cost us dearly should a greater global conflict arise in the future.
Our Afghanistan withdrawal sent a clear message: America was in retreat and willing to abandon our allies. Weakness replaced America’s strength, and Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine just six months later.
There is a strong case to be made that the Afghanistan withdrawal directly influenced Putin’s decision to invade. Russia had invaded a neighbor during each U.S. presidency since Putin had first taken national office in 1999, from Clinton to Biden, with the sole exception of President Trump. When Biden had been vice president, of course, Putin had invaded Ukraine the first time, and he and Obama had responded by failing to give Ukraine lethal weapons to defend itself.
The Middle East, too, has a keen eye for weakness, and the region has fallen into a tailspin. The Afghanistan disaster appalled Senior Arab leaders. They saw rightly that America’s word was no longer its bond, that it had fled in weakness and disgrace and that its allies were now in danger. If the United States could not be counted on to stand with them against Iran, then the Arab world would seek their own security and accommodation elsewhere.
Israel could not, of course. Iran’s overriding goal in the region is to annihilate Israel and dominate the region, and the Biden-Harris administration has been a godsend for Tehran. The Administration’s Afghanistan disaster and regional policies allowed Iran to isolate Israel, cut it off from its Arab partners and hollow out the Abraham Accords by making their security component too risky. The Abraham Accords were intended to buttress Sunni and Israeli security but cannot exist apart from American influence and the implicit guarantee that the US would have their back if they faced a dire threat. Now that is gone, and Israel is under an unprecedented assault.
Unwinding the Biden-Harris Administration’s record of fecklessness and disaster in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere will take time for a new Trump administration. Their humiliation in Kabul, with those Afghans falling from the airplane, and carelessness at home, with insults to the families, will take time to mend. The damage to our military and to the world from Afghanistan was immense and has never properly been addressed. If there is justice in this world, however, the coming election will allow us to do that.
Mike Waltz represents Florida’s 6th Congressional District. He is a combat decorated green beret, retired Army National Guard colonel, and veteran of the War in Afghanistan.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.
