This was supposed to be infrastructure summer. The Senate voted to advance a bipartisan piece of legislation funding roads, bridges, and other traditional brick-and-mortar projects alongside a Democrats-only reconciliation bill chock-full of liberal policy priorities.
That’s $1.2 trillion the two parties largely agree on and another $3.5 trillion to be passed through a divided Congress with Democratic votes alone. But then, Afghanistan came and pushed everything else out of the headlines.
Ending the 20-year-old war in Afghanistan was a popular campaign promise for President Joe Biden. Polls have shown for years that majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents were ready for the last troops to leave. But Biden was caught flat-footed when the Taliban quickly took over the country amid a chaotic withdrawal.
The administration and the Pentagon downplayed Taliban advances until Kabul fell. The evacuation of U.S. personnel seemed poorly planned. The fate of many interpreters and others who helped the war effort over the past two decades is unclear. The scenes of Afghans hanging off airplanes trying to flee the country gripped the public conscience.
Public polling supports the idea that infrastructure is being ignored as the chaos in Afghanistan unfolds. A national survey by Morning Consult found that 36% of voters had read, seen, or heard “a lot” about the Taliban takeover compared to just 27% who said the same about the Democrats’ reconciliation bill. The bipartisan infrastructure package did a little better at 34%. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s resignation received even more attention, according to the poll.
Biden’s job approval rating hit its lowest point in his presidency so far in a Reuters/Ipsos poll. As the Afghanistan situation spiraled out of control, his approval went from a healthy 53% to 46%. One top Democratic data scientist predicted that if Biden was below 50% at the end of the year, “we’re probably f***ed” in the approaching midterm elections. Democrats are defending thin majorities in both houses of Congress.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Withdrawing from Afghanistan was intended in part to free up the resources and political capital to rebuild at home. The White House has tried valiantly to change the subject. Biden delivered a speech about COVID-19 booster shots from the White House and took no questions afterward. On Thursday morning, his press team blasted out a fact sheet on how the “Build Back Better” agenda would help small businesses.
“’Mess’ is a perfect description of this situation,” said Jim Dornan, a veteran Republican operative in Washington, D.C., who pointed out that former President Donald Trump, a possible contender for the White House again in 2024 in a rematch with Biden, wanted to do the same thing despite his efforts to distinguish his withdrawal plans from the exit now underway.
“We don’t have a complete picture of where every article of defense material has gone,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan admitted at a White House daily press briefing. “But certainly, a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban, and obviously, we don’t have a sense that they are going to readily hand it over to us at the airport.”
Biden will need to have troops find and destroy this equipment, said Jason Killmeyer, a counterterrorism and foreign policy expert, get Americans and allies out, and find a new way to project force into Afghanistan credibly if new threats emerge.
“I don’t think the capabilities of the Afghan government would have appreciably changed if we stayed longer,” Killmeyer said. “But we could have done more to fund our proxies and prevent a Taliban takeover and still completed what most Americans would have considered a withdrawal.”
Killmeyer added that we will now have to rely on the same president and military advisers who botched the withdrawal to oversee the new strategy of protecting against Afghan-originated terror threats from afar. “We have tried to manage this from the air before,” he said, pointing to the use of this approach throughout the 1990s.
Biden has nevertheless expressed confidence in his government’s ability to manage terror plots in this manner. “We’ve developed counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on any direct threats to the United States in the region and to act quickly and decisively if needed,” he vowed in a speech in the East Room of the White House after cutting short his vacation to address the instability.
The president isn’t backing down in the face of a public backlash. “I know my decision will be criticized, but I would rather take all that criticism than pass this decision on to another president of the United States — yet another one — a fifth one,” Biden said. He later told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos that “chaos” following withdrawal was inevitable.
