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US militaryPentagon orders commercial airlines to help in Afghanistan evacuationsDefense secretary: ‘We’re gonna try our very best to get everybody, every American citizen who wants to get out, out’
Ex-Afghan ambassador warns of women’s fate under Taliban
Martin Pengelly in New York and agencies@ More
Democrats fear that if the pandemic or the situation in Afghanistan continues to worsen, their party may lose the confidence of the moderate swing voters who lifted it to victory in 2020.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 and stanch a resurgent pandemic that appeared to be waning only weeks ago.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.On Capitol Hill, lawmakers announced congressional investigations into the administration’s handling of the withdrawal, as a handful of Democratic lawmakers weighed whether calling for the resignation of Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, would help the president “reset the narrative,” according to a Democratic House member, speaking on the condition of anonymity.The harrowing images appalled even the president’s staunchest supporters, many of whom — like a majority of the American public — support the decision to remove American troops from Afghanistan. But some of them worry the execution of the withdrawal has undermined Mr. Biden’s central campaign promise to restore a steady hand to governance, particularly on issues of national security.Interviews with more than 40 Democrats, lawmakers, strategists and party officials show a White House at a pivot point. If the virus continues to worsen or the situation in Afghanistan deteriorates further, 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. Already, Democrats in battleground districts have been sounding alarms that the party needs to become more aggressive with their messaging, particularly on the economy and the efforts to combat the surge in coronavirus cases fueled by the highly contagious Delta variant.There are plenty of other reasons for Democrats to be worried: Historically, the president’s party loses seats in the midterm elections and the Republican advantage in redistricting has only increased those odds.For many establishment Democrats, the Taliban’s rapid seizure of Afghanistan was the first time during Mr. Biden’s administration that they found themselves creating any daylight between themselves and the president.“I consider Afghanistan a bone-headed mistake, unforced error,” said David Walters, a former Oklahoma governor who is now a member of the Democratic National Committee’s executive committee. “There is no real excuse. This was morally and politically a disaster and just bad policy.”Yet, so far, most of the party has walked a fine line between expressing dismay at the current situation while not publicly denouncing the White House’s role in it.“Afghanistan definitely has entered the conversation in a big way. We’ve done six or seven town halls in the last week and Afghanistan has come up in all of them,” said State Senator Jeff Jackson of North Carolina, an Army veteran who fought in Kandahar and is now running for the U.S. Senate. “It’s pretty clear there are concerns. They’ve seen the images we’ve all seen.”Still, when asked about the administration’s responsibility for the evacuation of Afghans who risked their lives to support U.S. troops, Mr. Jackson offered a tempered critique.“It should have been a much higher priority for the current administration,” he said.On a conference call on Friday organized by the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, four House members who served in the military — two Democrats and two Republicans — tried to tamp down the political recriminations, but their frustrations peeked through. Representative Kai Kahele, Democrat of Hawaii, acknowledged that the “optics” could not “get any worse than an entire airfield of Afghans running around a taxiing C-17, having that aircraft take off and have Afghans fall to their deaths.”Representative Kai Kahele, Democrat of Hawaii, is a combat veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.Kelsey Walling/Hawaii Tribune-Herald, via Associated PressWhether that kind of restraint will hold remains a major question for the White House. Administration officials believe that the public remains on their side, with polling showing firm support for the withdrawal, and that any political fallout from the current crisis will fade long before the midterm elections. But Republicans are salivating over what they see as an opportunity to push a broader narrative of a weak and incompetent White House, furthering the caricature of Mr. Biden as a bystander in his own administration.“Democrats are universally satisfied with their president. They think he’s kept his promises and they blame Republican obstruction for anything that he hasn’t gotten,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster who recently consulted with the White House on its pandemic response. “That said, there’s a certain point when Democrats will begin to question whether he’s got the right stuff.”Mr. Biden has offered a defiant defense of both his decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and his handling of the resurgence of the virus. After a campaign that promised bipartisan comity and a desire to extend a hand across the aisle, Mr. Biden has begun blaming Republican governors, some of whom have banned mask mandates in their states, for prolonging the pandemic and threatening the safe return to in-person schooling.He has attributed the swift collapse of the government in Kabul and tumultuous scenes at the airport there to the refusal of Afghanistan’s military to fight in the face of the Taliban advance. On Friday, Mr. Biden offered his most extensive remarks about the situation in a news conference, a tacit acknowledgment by the administration that its earlier response had failed to assuage concerns.“I made the decision,” he said, while acknowledging that the United States received conflicting information before the operation about how quickly Afghanistan’s government might fall. “I took the consensus opinion.”Mr. Biden’s response was a sharp departure for a politician who spent decades stressing the importance of human rights while cultivating a folksy, feel-your-pain persona.Meighan Stone, an expert on women’s rights and foreign policy with the Council on Foreign Relations, said Democratic women spent years hearing about the plight of Afghan women and many were disappointed in what they saw as Mr. Biden’s callous response in this moment of crisis.“It’s been deeply disappointing to see the lack of empathy communicated,” said Ms. Stone, who also sits on the board of Indivisible, a national network of local liberal groups. “There’s a profound disconnect between President Biden’s remarks and the images women are seeing on TV and social media of Afghan women and girls in need.”Strategists in both parties caution that the midterm elections are still more than a year away, leaving far from certain the long-term political effect of both the Delta variant and Afghanistan on Democrats’ narrow control of the Senate and House.Understand the Taliban Takeover in AfghanistanCard 1 of 5Who are the Taliban? 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Joe Biden‘America first’ again? Is Biden echoing Trump on Afghanistan and vaccines? The president’s pushing of a US-centric agenda has dismayed many but his defenders say it is ‘progressive nationalism’David Smith in Washington@ More
OpinionAfghanistanThe west’s nation-building fantasy is to blame for the mess in AfghanistanSimon JenkinsBritish MPs have turned on Boris Johnson – but what tidy end did they expect from this imperialist experiment? Fri 20 Aug 2021 03.00 EDTLast modified on Fri 20 Aug 2021 04.32 EDTBritain’s MPs this week uttered one long howl of anguish over Afghanistan. Their immediate targets were Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, politicians who just happened to be on the watch when Kabul’s pack of cards collapsed. But their real concern was that a collective 20-year experiment in “exporting western values” to Afghanistan had fallen into chaos. MPs wanted someone other than themselves to blame. A politician is never so angry as when proved wrong.Even the crisis in Afghanistan can’t break the spell of Britain’s delusional foreign policy | Owen JonesRead moreLike their fellow representatives in Congress, MPs somehow hoped the end would be nice and tidy, with speeches and flags, much like Britain’s exit from Hong Kong. Instead, tens of thousands of Afghans who had lived in an effective colony under years of Nato occupation had come to believe the west would either never leave or somehow protect them from Taliban retribution. They were swiftly disabused.In 2006 I stood at dusk on a castle wall overlooking Kabul with a young UN official. He had just heard the Kandahar road was no longer safe. “Why,” he sighed, “can’t Afghanistan be more like Sweden?” I tried to see if he was smiling, but he was grimacing. For another 15 years, armies of western soldiers and civilians hurled stupefying amounts of money at the country. They created a wildly corrupt western dependency, where some 50,000 Afghans have links with the west that are now lethal. As for the “western-trained” army, one of its trainers told me it was mostly for show. An occupying power could not possibly motivate local youths to kill their fellow countrymen who might soon be ruling them. He rightly predicted: “They will just walk home.”It is now 22 years since Tony Blair gave a speech in Chicago lecturing the US on his doctrine of international intervention. He wanted the west to invade countries across the world not in self-defence, but to save people everywhere from oppression. It was a reformulation of Alfred Milner’s Victorian concept of moral imperialism. British politicians on both the left and the right have long been uncomfortable about the abandonment of Milnerism as the acceptable face of empire. Global policing is somehow embedded in Britain’s political DNA. All Blair’s wars of aggression were cheered on in the House of Commons.Many people have spoken this week of the “decline of the west”, lamenting the collapse of US moral authority. Yet these theories are beside the point. The belief that our moral values are somehow meaningless unless they are enforced upon those who do not share them is imperialist bigotry. It also leads to absurd biases. Iraq is now thought of as “bad interventionism”, as opposed to Afghanistan’s “good” version. The virtue of the latter invasion led President Obama in 2009 to bless the war in Afghanistan with a “surge” of soldiers, taking the US total to 110,000, mere target practice for the Taliban.American gunboat diplomacy, initially supposed to salve the wounds of 9/11 in 2001, opened the door to fake morality and a trillion-dollar nation-building fantasy. The catastrophic return of Taliban autonomy became its inevitable conclusion. The US – with Britain as its lackey – committed liberal interventionism’s cardinal sin: half-heartedness. The craving to intervene is always followed by a craving to withdraw. Traditional empires at least pretended they would never leave. As it was, Afghanistan replicated departures from India, South Africa, Hong Kong and Iraq. If you invade and conquer an alien state, you own it, but must then disown it. Western rule has killed an estimated 240,000 in Afghanistan since 2001, more than the Taliban ever did. It has not left morality, just a mess. We must assume strategists in Washington and London are now planning interventions in Taiwan and Ukraine against possible Chinese and Russian expansion. If you ask taxpayers to spend billions on defence, you need something to show for it. So you pretend, as Johnson did in his bizarre conversation with Biden this week, that “gains” were made in Afghanistan. You accuse non-interventionists, as did the former Tory leader William Hague, of demonstrating “the enfeeblement of the western mind”. In a recent column, Hague called on Britain to continue invading foreign countries when “our common humanity demands it”. In doing so, he sounded like Pope Urban summoning the First Crusade.The concept of a global police force, so often cited, requires some framework of global consent. When the United Nations was founded, that consent was rooted in the first chapter of its charter. This stated that all members “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state”. On that basis it achieved general consent, if not always obedience. The end of the cold war and the assumed superiority of liberal western values emboldened the US and Britain to declare a “responsibility to protect” all those oppressed by their governments. The authority of the UN charter – rooted in national sovereignty – collapsed, and the UN gave way to the US as a self-declared policeman.The American cold war historian Francis Fukuyama wrote recently that the US “is not likely to regain its earlier hegemonic status, nor should it aspire to”. There is no such thing as a global policeman. Individual nations best serve humanity by example or charity, not by war. Military intervention is rarely, if ever, humane. Western regimes have enough woes to confront in their own countries. If they crave moral outreach, it should be through the imperialism of ideas, of receptive minds and open doors, not of guns and bombs.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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US military‘Move heaven and earth’: pressure on Biden to speed up visas for Afghans who helped US Members of Congress warn that those who aided US military are in grave danger as they wait for evacuations and paperworkDaniel Strauss in Washington@ More
For days now, the news media has likened the chaotic end of our misadventure in Afghanistan, and the awful images of terrified people scrambling onto planes at the Kabul airport, to the final exit from South Vietnam. The comparison is overdrawn; the last American combat troops left Indochina two years before the collapse of the Saigon government.But there is at least one potential parallel between the two conflicts that should have President Biden worried: The last time a war blew up in the face of a Democratic president, it derailed his domestic agenda and stalled the most ambitious social reforms of a generation.To be sure, domestic political concerns should not overshadow the immediate urgency of getting all Americans and the Afghans who worked for them out of Afghanistan. But history shows how adversity abroad has often led to trouble for the governing party back home. Mr. Biden may not be able to save his ambitious legislative agenda unless he understands that lesson from the past.In 1964, Lyndon Johnson and his fellow Democrats secured crushing majorities that enabled them to enact a flurry of landmark legislation: the Voting Rights Act, the bill establishing Medicare and Medicaid, an overhaul of immigration law. It is a feat Mr. Biden and progressive Democrats in Congress today would dearly like to emulate.But Johnson’s decision early in 1965 to send thousands of troops to combat the Vietcong soon halted the momentum of his Great Society agenda and put Democrats on the defensive. A year later, as the war dragged on and protests mounted, Johnson’s approval rating dipped below 50 percent. In the midterm contests of 1966, the Republican Party picked up 47 seats in the House, and Democratic governors in eight states were replaced by Republicans — one of them a former actor in California named Ronald Reagan. By 1968, Republicans had taken back the White House, and Democrats never achieved a progressive policy agenda as far-reaching again.Joe Biden bears far less responsibility for the defeat in Afghanistan than Lyndon Johnson did for the debacle in Indochina. 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. He can also claim that he was merely carrying out an agreement Donald Trump signed last year.Furthermore, unlike the Vietnam War, which provoked a long, scorching debate that divided the country far more bitterly and profoundly than the more limited, if longer, battle with the Taliban ever did, this conflict could soon be forgotten. 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.Yet the president and his fellow Democrats face a political environment so daunting that even the slightest disruption could derail their domestic agenda. Even before the Afghan crisis, they needed the vote of every senator from their party to enact their budget blueprint, and Mr. Biden has never had the sky-high approval ratings that allowed Johnson to rule Congress with an iron fist. This week, for the first time, his rating dipped into the 40s. Whatever they manage to accomplish in Congress, Democrats could easily lose their narrow control of both houses in the next midterm elections, especially if Republicans effectively inflame fears about Afghan refugees being resettled in this country.The United States has not had a true majority party for 50 years, and that stalemate, with the enduringly fierce partisanship it engenders, is unlikely to end soon. To pass the big reforms he wants, Mr. Biden will need to describe what he did to end this war better than Johnson explained why he dispatched troops to meddle in another civil conflict in a nation thousands of miles from their homeland.President Lyndon Johnson with Gen. William Westmoreland in South Vietnam in 1967. The Vietnam War derailed Johnson’s domestic agenda.Yoichi Okamoto/LBJ LibraryTwo lessons from Johnson’s downfall are paramount. First, tell the truth, even if it makes you look bad, temporarily. The 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers demonstrated that Johnson lied continually when he lauded the progress the United States and its South Vietnamese allies were supposedly making. By 1966, the press was accusing the administration of creating a credibility gap that only yawned wider as the conflict escalated.All presidents lie at times, but those who admit mistakes, particularly obvious ones, can retain their popularity. This happened to John F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 and to Bill Clinton when he acknowledged his affair with Monica Lewinsky in 1998 (although he benefited more from the Republicans’ failed attempt to throw him out of office).Mr. Biden made a decent start at such truth-telling during his speech this week. But he should give a fuller explanation of why his administration failed to prepare for a Taliban victory that, according to years of intelligence reports, was quite likely.Second, keep the coalition that elected you united in its response to the crisis. Though Johnson had a reputation as a masterful politician, he became despised by millions of his fellow Democrats because of his Vietnam policy. If Democrats in Congress follow through on their vows to carry out extensive hearings into the collapse of the Afghan government, they could provoke a similar intraparty battle.But the president may be able to stave off that kind of public bickering. If he chooses to declassify whatever vital documents exist, in an attempt to convince his Democratic critics that he is serious about revealing why his exit strategy went wrong, it may dissuade them from engaging in their own lengthy investigation.The defeat in Afghanistan, like the one in Vietnam, was a long time coming. Democrats can take steps to prevent such interventions. But if they repeat the errors of their predecessors in the 1960s, they may secure the triumph of an opposition party whose leaders have not stopped lying about the election that drove them from power.Michael Kazin (@mkazin), a professor of history at Georgetown University, is the author of the forthcoming book “What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More
