The GOP Will Spin Failure and Humiliation in Afghanistan Hard. Here’s How To Counter That.

Photo: Evelyn Hocksten / Reuters

With the fall of Kabul to the Taliban over the weekend, a long, costly and bloody war in Afghanistan came to a bitter but not unpredictable end. Twenty years and well over $1 trillion later, with over 20,000 U.S. servicemembers killed or wounded in the conflict, Americans were united in ending the war and backed Biden’s plan to honor the former president’s pledge to remove all troops before September 11, 2021. But that won’t stop the Republicans from taking full advantage of the chaos, miscalculations and horror that unfolded when the country collapsed. It’s important to understand how the GOP will leverage the perceived failure in at least three ways: redirecting the blame toward Biden and away from former president Trump, amplifying the human misery that will continue to unfold there, and unifying around a foreign policy humiliation.

Redirecting the Blame

The Taliban had yet not seized the capital and the GOP was already gleeful at Biden’s missteps—and shameless in its ahistorical finger-pointing. The most cynical move came from the Republican National Committee Chairwoman herself, who tweeted, “With the Taliban in charge of Afghanistan, the United States of America is less safe because of Joe Biden.” Jaime Harrison, her counterpart at the DNC, responded, “Oh Ronna…what happened to your GOP website page praising Trump’s negotiations with the Taliban on withdrawal from Afghanistan?  Forgot it?  Oh, Here it is”—then included an image of the page now scrubbed from the GOP’s website.

That page once trumpeted that former President Trump would “end America’s longest war” and had agreed to withdraw troops from the country in exchange for a “promise” by the Taliban not to permit the country to be used as a base for transnational terrorism. When President Biden took office, his predecessor had left only 2,500 American troops there as a bare minimum force and had already committed America to withdraw May 1, 2021. Biden extended that a few months in order to be able to get American forces and their allies out safely, vowing not to be the fifth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan.

Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, sought to imply that Biden’s policies were a failed execution of their successful negotiations. “The Taliban are butchers. We demanded a set of conditions and made clear the costs we would impose if they failed to deliver. They haven’t. The deterrence we achieved held during our time. This administration has failed,” Pompeo tweeted. This take was particularly galling, given that Pompeo had negotiated the release of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a Taliban co-founder who is likely the incoming president, while the former president normalized the Taliban by inviting them to Camp David for talks. 

Nonetheless, the GOP is hoping the American public, and particularly their hard core base, have short memories and can be misled to believe that the fault lies with the current president. This is not unlike the current efforts to brand Biden’s pandemic response as a failure because of a surge in states led by callous GOP governors after over a year of right-wing anti-vaccine propaganda. It also is reminiscent of how the Great Recession that President Obama inherited from his predecessor became his problem to solve, with every effort to pull the U.S. out of its economic slump met with resistance and criticism. 

It will be up to Democrats and other non-brainwashed Americans to push back on such galling rewrites to history. We already have a bit of help from the anti-Trump wing of the Republican Party: Rep. Liz Cheney was quick to note that while President Biden bears the responsibility of the decision to withdraw, “[T]here's no question President Trump, his administration, Secretary Pompeo, they also bear very significant responsibility for this. They walked down this path of legitimizing the Taliban.” (Her critics noted that she conveniently left out that the war’s origins also lay with her own father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who led the war efforts during the Bush Administration.)

Amplifying the Human Misery

There will be a tragic drumbeat of horror stories coming out of Afghanistan as the Taliban clamp down and begin reimposing fundamentalist laws, rules, and punishments. Especially devastating will be the impact on women and girls, who for twenty years had enjoyed greater freedoms but now will be forced back into positions of subservience and in most cases hidden, literally, from view. 

It will be difficult for progressives and liberals to watch the GOP presume to take any kind of moral high ground with women’s and children’s rights and the suffering of those seeking but unable to flee the country. Yet we should expect Fox News to begin non-stop coverage of how brutal the Taliban are in the hopes that their rise will be pinned to Biden’s withdrawal.

Testing the limits of their hypocrisy is not a new tactic by the GOP. They are, after all, the same party that backed the Muslim ban, imposed strict limits on refugees including political asylum seekers, and separated migrant children from parents and kept them in cages at the border. But pointing out the double-speak of the GOP doesn’t move the needle much in public opinion, where one-third of the country is already captured by right-wing media. Further, the outrage over their hypocrisy has the disadvantage of reamplifying the underlying atrocities, and that can lead to the unwanted effect of once again associating Democrats with failure, even if it is not of their making. Democrats would be wise to not unduly focus on this hypocrisy lest we keep the Afghan debacle top of mind for the public. 

Unifying Around a Perceived Foreign Policy Failure

Republicans haven’t had much to come together around recently that doesn’t spectacularly backfire. Unity around vaccine and mask mandates has had the horrific downside of sickening and even killing off tens of thousands who are largely members of their own party. Messaging over rising gas prices or inflation hasn’t stuck, particularly with strong job numbers and signs that inflation is easing. And angry opposition to Critical Race Theory and trans girls in sports—build around the old politics of division—risks turning off moderate voters in the suburbs who don’t share the racism and transphobia of the more rabid MAGA voters.

That’s why the rapid disintegration of Afghanistan and the humiliating, Vietnam-like withdrawal is a welcome gift to the GOP. While Democrats can try to redirect the blame over the 20 years of American involvement, it is far harder for them to support the way in which the withdrawal unfolded, nor should we even try as it is hard to spin this as anything but a failure. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who himself served in Afghanistan, saw immediately how the GOP was beginning to use it. He tweeted, “Now, people like this will say ‘[I]t’s a mess because of HOW we withdrew, had we only done it a different WAY it would have been great’ as a way to not own this, or protect the prior president.  Nope sorry won’t work.”

But the GOP might try to make it stick anyway. It wouldn’t be surprising to hear calls for investigations into the botched departure, with an emphasis on how the warnings were all there for Biden to see but he badly underestimated the Taliban or overestimated our Afghan allies. Should the GOP retake the House, we might also expect to see Benghazi-level hearings over the issue because it will keep the notion of political and military failure fresh in the minds of voters all the way through 2024.

So what is the answer to these three versions of expected GOP outcry? At the risk of sounding cynical, the fact is that we really do have problems of our own to worry about at home, from the pandemic surge to underlying risks to the economy. President Biden appears to understand this, declining to even emerge from his vacation over the weekend to address the nation on the situation. While this may seem heartless to many liberals and cowardly to the GOP, it may be wise politics. Biden can accept his first major policy failure and work to ameliorate the situation on the ground without giving the media more headline stories around it than it already will produce. 

Biden also understands that the American public, despite being horrified at how the withdrawal took place, still supports the withdrawal of forces by huge margins. In early July, Americans favored withdrawal of our troops by a margin of 57 to 20 percent. Even after the parade of horribles and the humiliation of this weekend, that number isn’t likely to flip; you can be both ashamed at how things went down and still very glad the decision was made. By reminding people that it is finally over, at least for American troops, and that a horrible mistake was not perpetuated any further and we can now focus on the multiple other crises we face, the White House could conceivably ride out this storm until it passes, no matter how strongly the GOP beats the Afghan drum. 

After all, and quite depressingly, if it is between stories of the Afghan people suffering or American children sick and dying in hospitals, the latter is likely to occupy the media’s and therefore the public’s attention. If history is any guide, the aftermath of the failed war in Iraq and the horrors of ISIS was something about which Americans simply did not want a daily reminder, no matter how responsible we were for the carnage. And today, combating the head-spinning GOP rhetoric over the delta variant surge in the Covid-19 crisis will already occupy most of the White House’s political, media and messaging resources.

The next few weeks will be rough for the White House, but we will see if they successfully put to bed, at least in the minds of non-MAGA voters, the inevitable failure but non-inevitable chaotic end of the American presence in Afghanistan, for which Biden bears much, but not all, of the blame.