Zabi Karimi/AP Photo
Taliban fighters take control of the presidential palace after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, in Kabul, Afghanistan, August 15, 2021.
The outcomes of America’s many wars usually loom large in subsequent elections. The opposition of the Federalists to the War of 1812 led to that party’s collapse. The 1848 war with Mexico emboldened Southern slaveholder interests, just as the Civil War relegated the Democrats to second-party status from 1865 until the coming of the New Deal. The stalemate in Korea kept Harry Truman from seeking re-election in 1952, just as it helped propel Dwight Eisenhower into the White House—in much the same way that the bloody stalemate in Vietnam drove Lyndon Johnson from the White House and enabled Richard Nixon to slink in.
In 2006, the Bush administration’s floundering in Iraq led to the election of a Democratic Congress. Two years later, it was largely Barack Obama’s opposition to the Iraq War that gained him a crucial advantage over Hillary Clinton, who’d initially supported the war, in the Democratic presidential primaries, even as support for that war (and any wars yet to come) helped doom the candidacy of Obama’s Republican opponent, John McCain.
Every now and then, though, American voters have shrugged off the outcome of a war. One notable dog that didn’t bark in the night was the role that our defeat in Vietnam played in the first presidential election after the fall of Saigon, the Carter-vs.-Ford contest of 1976.
Despite the horrific scenes of the last Americans fleeing by helicopters from the roof of the U.S. embassy, as desperate Vietnamese struggled to get aboard, it played no role whatever.
Joe Biden was already a senator when the South Vietnamese army melted away and the communists marched into Saigon. He doubtless has clear memories not only of that, but also of the ’76 presidential race, which centered on Jimmy Carter’s promise to lift government from the swamp of Watergate ethics, from which Gerald Ford had failed to extricate himself by pardoning Richard Nixon. Every voter knew that more than 50,000 American lives had been lost in Vietnam, and several million Vietnamese lives as well, but when those voters went to the polls, it was Watergate and a shaky economy that were on their minds.
The odds are still that Americans will go to the polls in 2022 with the state of the pandemic and the economy as their foremost considerations.
Such memories appear to have informed President Biden’s address yesterday, which centered on his decision to end America’s military intervention in Afghanistan—a decision he’s rightly convinced that the American people (and not just Democrats) support. That doesn’t mean that the events of the past few days hold no peril for him. But, again, the fall of Vietnam may illustrate the limits of that peril.
Though no one advocated for sending troops back to Vietnam once the Communists took control of the South, a movement did emerge with a narrow focus on one aspect of the withdrawal of U.S. forces. Its belief was that somehow, though the government had negotiated the release of American prisoners of war, we had left other prisoners behind. There was never a shred of evidence that this was in fact the case, nor a plausible argument as to why the Communists would want to hold American POWs for years following the war, at a nontrivial cost to themselves. But for a number of frustrated war veterans, as well as right-wingers given to conspiracy theories, this belief provided a way to blame the government for betraying American soldiers and fliers (as if getting us into the war, escalating it, and stretching it well beyond any point when we could expect any outcome other than defeat wasn’t in itself grounds for discontent).
What Biden must strive to avoid—politically—is conveying the impression that he’s abandoned both our troops and their allies. If no American is killed or taken hostage during the next several weeks, if they make it out unharmed along with those Afghans who’ve sided with us or prominently flouted the Taliban’s barbaric norms, then the administration will likely claim that the mission of withdrawal has been a success, albeit the kind of success that the British had at Dunkirk.
Should Americans be taken hostage or killed, however, Biden will face the kind of criticism that Jimmy Carter faced due to the hostage-taking in Iran and his inability to end it. In this, Biden has to hope that the Taliban have fairly keen strategic smarts. For just as the North Vietnamese believed it was pointless to hang on to American POWs, so the Taliban, you’d think, would understand that it’s in their interest not to obstruct fleeing Westerners, or even fleeing Afghans—though that latter option in particular may be giving their strategic sense too much credit.
If hell is to be justly paid in the sub-presidential ranks of advisers for this past week’s debacle, the authors of rosy intelligence reports should be the ones on the chopping blocks. The complete collapse of Afghan armed forces has now joined the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the fall of the Soviet Union on the list of galactically large failures from our intelligence agencies. In the past two days, the media have reported that Afghan soldiers had received neither paychecks nor food in recent months—even as the Taliban paid them to hand over their weapons and go home. That the Taliban could, in effect, financially outbid the United States, which has misspent over a trillion dollars in Afghanistan, for the allegiance of the Afghan army, suggests levels of corruption and dysfunction so blatant that no sentient being—much less U.S. intelligence officials—should have failed to at least notice it, even if that meant noting that our mission there, once al-Qaeda had been chased from the country 19 years ago, had been a stupendous failure.
The odds are still that Americans will go to the polls in 2022 with the state of the pandemic and the economy as their foremost considerations, with the outcome of our two-decade Afghan adventure well down their list if it’s on it at all. For it to be altogether stricken from that list, Biden had better hope he can bring home all the Americans still in that unhappy land.
