With a renewed focus being placed on President Joe Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal, it bears repeating that Biden held no one accountable for it, including himself.
The testimony by former military officials on Biden’s withdrawal in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee made it clear that the withdrawal was rushed and poorly planned, in case that hadn’t been made clear over two years ago when the disastrous plan was being carried out in real time. As retired Gen. Mark Milley said, Biden and his State Department were “too slow and too late” in launching a full evacuation from the country after Biden’s plan allowed the Taliban to run roughshod over Afghan forces.
Another recent focus of this inexcusable debacle was the death of 13 U.S. service members at the hands of a suicide bomber. The father of one dead service member was arrested at the State of the Union for heckling Biden. Given that it is back in the news, it is worth recapping the lead-up to and fallout from that attack.
Biden allowed the Taliban to be in charge of the security of the airport in Kabul where Americans were being evacuated. This resulted from Biden’s rushed withdrawal depriving Afghan forces of air support and contractors, allowing the Taliban to blitz through the country to Kabul. Unsurprisingly, leaving airport security to the Taliban somehow allowed an ISIS-K suicide bomber to kill those 13 U.S. service members along with 170 Afghans.
(In a somewhat related story, the Associated Press reported in October 2021 that the Taliban was offering cash and land to the families of suicide bombers who killed U.S. and Afghan soldiers. Surely that is just a coincidence.)
In response to that, Biden oversaw a retaliatory drone strike against someone the military identified as a terrorist. Milley himself came out after the strike and declared it a “righteous” one. Then it turned out that the man killed was an aid worker with no terrorist ties, along with nine members of his family, including seven children.
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Was anyone fired for this, the security failure that led to the suicide bombing, or any other element of the botched withdrawal? It does not appear that anyone was even disciplined for any of these things. We know Biden has tried to move on from Afghanistan given that it was the event that showed Americans that he was incompetent, which is reflected in how his approval rating tanked and how it still hasn’t recovered.
The lack of accountability has been glaring ever since the withdrawal happened. That is especially true with Biden, the man in charge with whom the buck is supposed to stop. Biden shoulders the burden for these failures, no matter how much he wants you to forget about it.