Rich Lowry of National Review Online identifies an early sign that Joe Biden would become a one-term president.
The beginning of the end of Joe Biden’s presidency arrived in August 2021.
That’s when the president began a catastrophic pullout from Afghanistan that shredded our national credibility and his own reputation. He never really recovered.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee has just released an exhaustive 353-page report putting on the record the sorry episode from beginning to end. The report’s overarching conclusion is that this was a Joe Biden operation from beginning to end.
He insisted on the withdrawal despite ample warnings from all sides with the bullheaded stubbornness of someone who is often wrong but never in doubt. To paraphrase Lincoln, Biden was the author and the finisher of the debacle in Afghanistan.
You practically weren’t a diplomatic or military official unless you were warning against the withdrawal. As the report notes, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the commander of U.S. Central Command, the secretary of state, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the commander of NATO’s Resolute Support Mission and United States Forces all were against it.
At a NATO ministerial meeting in March 2021 attended by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, NATO representatives strenuously argued against the pullout. A shaken Blinken relayed the NATO concerns to Biden, saying that they had come at him in “quadraphonic sound.”
It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
Biden likes to pretend that his hands were tied by the Doha agreement, a deal struck between the Trump administration and the Taliban in February 2020. We would remove U.S. troops if the Taliban met certain obligations.
Again, as the report notes, a who’s who of officials attested to Taliban violations of the conditions of the Doha agreement. …
… When his aides suggested to Biden insisting on “conditionality” before pulling out, he rejected it.
