Joe Biden is (for a change) getting bipartisan criticism in wake of his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, and according to a report from Just The News, members of both parties are calling for an investigation into what went wrong.
“Democrats vowed ‘tough questions’ Tuesday as they used words like ‘flawed,’ ‘failures’ and ‘horrifying’ to describe the administration’s exit strategy and the scenes unfolding in Kabul,” reports Just The News.
“I hope to work with the other committees of jurisdiction to ask tough but necessary questions about why we weren’t better prepared for a worst-case scenario involving such a swift and total collapse of the Afghan government and security forces,” Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) said in a statement. “We owe those answers to the American people and to all those who served and sacrificed so much.”
Warner is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He wasn’t alone.
“In implementing this flawed plan, I am disappointed that the Biden administration clearly did not accurately assess the implications of a rapid U.S. withdrawal,” Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) said in a statement. “We are now witnessing the horrifying results of many years of policy and intelligence failures.”
Related: Why I Wasn’t Impressed With George W. Bush’s Statement on Afghanistan
But, can we trust Democrats to really hold a legitimate hearing holding Joe Biden accountable? I’m not banking on it. Is it even really about Joe Biden? “The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will continue fulfilling its oversight role with a hearing on U.S. policy towards Afghanistan,” Menendez’s statement continued. “Including the Trump administration’s flawed negotiations with Taliban, and the Biden administration’s flawed execution of the U.S. withdrawal.”
Ahhh, there it is. Did anyone really think Democrats would hold Biden accountable for botching the withdrawal from Afghanistan without trying to spread some blame around to Trump?
That was never going to happen.
Joe Biden has tried to claim that he simply inherited a deal cut by Trump and he had no choice but to follow through. This was quickly disputed by both Trump, who said “It’s not that we left Afghanistan. It’s the grossly incompetent way we left!” and Mike Pence, who pointed out that Biden broke the deal with the Taliban by keeping U.S. forces in Afghanistan for four extra months “without a clear reason for doing so,” and that the Taliban clearly learned that the Biden administration wouldn’t hold them up to their end of the deal anyway.
Regardless, it was Biden, not Trump, who rushed the evacuation from Afghanistan. It was Biden, not Trump, who evacuated our military before American civilians, and then had to bring troops back. It was Biden, not Trump, who left billions of American military weapons and equipment behind. The problem wasn’t the deal negotiated by Trump, the problem was Biden, who went his own way with his own plan because, as Mike Pence put it, he “simply didn’t want to appear to be abiding by the terms of a deal negotiated by his predecessor.”
I’d love to believe that Democrats are so furious at Biden’s incompetence that would hold a legitimate investigation and hearings to get to the bottom of it, but my money is on a show investigation, designed to protect Democrats next November while also finding ways to absolve Biden as much as possible and pin much of the blame of Trump.
I hope I’m proven wrong.