This month marks two years since President Joe Biden ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, bringing America’s two-decade war there to an end. One might hope that Washington would be engaged in a searching debate about what went wrong in that conflict. So far, alas, it’s not clear that hindsight is making America much wiser.
See, most recently, the Biden administration’s “after action review” of the U.S. withdrawal. That document is not an objective assessment of a searing episode. It is an exercise in blame-shifting and rationalization.
The report blames former President Donald Trump, correctly, for signing a flawed peace deal that was merely a fig leaf for U.S. withdrawal. It blames the intelligence community, correctly, for failing to foresee the speed of the Afghan military’s collapse. It blames the Afghan government, correctly, for failing to take measures that might have delayed defeat. The report does not, however, acknowledge any mistakes on the part of current senior American leaders or the president himself.
