The Biden-Blinken Apologia

Here follows, reprinted in full, CNN’s account of what we should call the Biden-Blinken apologia related to his conspicuous failures in withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan:

Blinken: "We inherited a deadline, we did not inherit a plan" on withdrawing US from Afghanistan

From CNN's Ellie Kaufman

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the Biden administration “inherited a deadline, we did not inherit a plan,” referring to former President Trump’s May 1 deadline for the US to withdraw from Afghanistan.

Here's how the exchange between Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, and Blinken unfolded in today's hearing:

Sherman: Did the Trump administration leave on your desk a pile of notebooks as to exactly how to carry out that plan? Did we have a list of which Afghans we were going to evacuate? Did we have a plan to get Americans from all over Afghanistan to Kabul and out in an orderly way? How meticulous was the planning for the Trump Administration declared May 1 withdrawal?

Blinken: Thank you congressman, we inherited a deadline, we did not inherit a plan.

Sherman: So no plan at all. It’s amazing that it wasn’t much, much worse.

Some more context: President Biden in remarks last month said he takes responsibility for the decision to withdraw at the end of August, but he also blamed his predecessor for signing on to an earlier agreement with the Taliban for a US withdrawal on May 1.

"My predecessor, the former President, signed an agreement with the Taliban to remove US troops May 1, just months after I was inaugurated. It included no requirement that the Taliban work out a cooperative government arrangement with the Afghan government," Biden said.

"But it did authorize the release of 5,000 prisoners last year, including some of the Taliban's top war commanders, among those that just took control of Afghanistan. By the time I came into office, the Taliban was in its strongest military position since 2001."

CNN's [BIDEN APOLOGISTS] Maegan Vazquez and Kevin Liptak contributed reporting to this post.

Most of the propositions detailed in the CNN report are objectively factual, but the larger truths here lie outside the facts. The centerpiece of the Trump “plan,” abandoned by Biden, was conditioned upon an agreement that the government of Afghanistan should be shared between the Taliban and the American supported regime, a condition undermined by Biden’s withdrawal of intelligence and military support of the Karzai-Ghani government. Like Trump, Karzai, who remained in Afghanistan after Ghani left, also wanted a fusion government.

Taken as a whole, the apologia is profoundly silly. The Biden-Blinken chief underlying plea, which stands out like a mashed, purple thumb, is that Biden inherited from Trump a “plan” that Biden, Trump’s successor, was bound to accept “as is.”

This is a profoundly silly view of unfolding events.

Almost immediately upon achieving office, Biden – and Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi, and leader of the U.S. Senate Chuck Schumer – began repealing most features of the Trump presidency.

Biden’s immediate repeal of Trump's border policy entailed, even CNN may agree, “troubling” consequences. And Biden’s attempt to pass through an almost evenly divided Congress what should properly be regarded as a Bernie Sander’s budget will carry in its wake equally “troubling” economic consequences.

The U.S. economy is now poised on the edge of a “troubling” recession, owing to policies pursued in many states by governors who had shut down businesses for more than a year. A recession is a slowdown in business activity that produces a predictable scarcity of goods and services. Such scarcities are ineluctably followed by higher prices, which many people in the United States may not be able, in a post-Coronavirus economy, to absorb into their household budgets.

Facing the prospect of a deepening recession, the Biden-Sanders proposal to increase taxes on profitable businesses and millionaires -- reversing the regulatory pull back and tax cuts of the Trump administration – is an arrogant but populist attempt to repeal the laws of economics. Of course, Sanders’ economic laws, which dovetail with those of failed autocratic states everywhere, are socialist in intent and nature. It is not at all surprising that a socialist Senator should embrace an economic policy that runs athwart the policies of John F. Kennedy, not to mention Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations.

Really, a President and his advisors who can repeal age-old sound economic prescriptions, not to mention Trump’s economic policies, can do anything, no?

Reversing an understanding – not a “plan,” even the brights that surround Biden have agreed – should have been a walk in the park for a President who styles himself as the latest incarnation of Franklin Roosevelt. The unacknowledged problem is this: Biden and his Democrat associates are arguing 1) we were forced to accept the terms of the Trump plan, and 2) there was no plan.

We should, as far as possible, take Blinken-Biden at their word: “Blinken: Thank you congressman, we inherited a deadline, we did not inherit a plan.”

Sorry, many apologies, but if Biden inherited from Trump no plan, he and Pentagon generals were free, over a six month period in which Biden was President, to construct a plan of withdrawal that would have assured a safe exit of all Americans in Afghanistan, as well as Afghans, numbering in the thousands, who had helped Americans prosecute a twenty year peace that had kept Taliban wolves from the door? Why was such a plan not pulled off the drawing board and made available long before Biden’s precipitous and ill-fated withdrawal?

Or -- was such a plan proffered by the Pentagon and rejected by Biden because he did not wish to miss the arrival of the 9-11 bus commemorating the 20 year old Salifist attack on the homeland, so that he might ring a campaign tocsin and announce that Democrats were able to end America’s forever war?