The return of the professionals: this is what the Biden administration should have looked like. Full heads and nerves of steel, wisdom and experience. This was one of the strengths of the Democratic president, surrounded by a self-confident team, determined to prune American foreign policy, to cut dead branches, to better focus on the Chinese challenge.
These veterans of the Obama era began by displaying an unusual humility, motivated in particular by the assault on Capitol Hill on January 6. No more egotistical vertigo imposed by Donald Trump. The allies of the United States were puffed up.
Here they are, tense, even distressed. Seven months later, the stampede in Afghanistan, forcing the White House to send back 6,000 men to take out its nationals in disaster, causes a major crisis. The logic would have been to evacuate civilians and their families first, then government employees, and the military last. Washington did the opposite, too eager to finally turn this page. Joe Biden’s advisers want to believe in a passing and inevitable storm.
An evacuation of unprecedented scale (nearly 70,000 people since August 14) has been launched. As columnist Jennifer Rubin notes, in the Washington Post, its final success could ” mute “ criticism of the administration. Especially when they come from former officials like ex-secretary of defense Leon Panetta, who compared the fall of Kabul to the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba (1961), or the former General David Petraeus, who commanded the international forces in Afghanistan. The very ones who have “Deliberately fed a false story about the progress of the Afghan army or who had no idea of the reality on the ground”, wrote Jennifer Rubin on Monday.
Big gap
Every day seems too short and very long. We must hold on, without major slippage on the ground, try to evacuate all the nationals before the end of the month, grit our teeth in the face of the Taliban ultimatums.
On August 20, Joe Biden defended his choices to the point of denial of reality, claiming that his country’s credibility was in no way disputed among America’s allies. “We entered together and we leave together”, did he declare. However, the trauma of this abandonment of Afghanistan to the Taliban, without prior consultations with the Europeans engaged on the ground, risks marking the continuation of the Biden presidency.
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