Lost in last week’s wall-to-wall coverage of the latest Trump indictment and President Joe Biden’s public-relations tour on the one-year anniversary of his costly Inflation Reduction Act was the anniversary of a dark chapter in American military history.
As the Washington Examiner reported:
Tuesday came and went, and with it, an opportunity for the Biden White House to commemorate the two-year anniversary of the fall of Kabul ahead of the completed U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Instead, President Joe Biden traveled to Milwaukee to deliver remarks on climate and his economic agenda. The failure to recognize what some consider the end of America’s longest war ran in stark contrast to many of Biden’s Republican opponents.
GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley hammered Biden on the disastrous collapse.
“Two years after the fall of Kabul and Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the world is less safe, our enemies are emboldened, and our allies are questioning America’s commitments,” the campaign of the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador said in a press release.
Ohio entrepreneur and top tier Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy marked the two-year anniversary of the Biden administration’s “botched Afghanistan withdrawal that left 13 or our sons and daughters dead. $8 billion in US military weapons abandoned and now in the hands of our enemies, including the Taliban.”
“The damage is incalculable,” Ramaswamy wrote on his X (formerly Twitter) account. “They could’ve waited until after fighting season, but didn’t. They could have left from the military air base in Bagram instead of the commercial airport in Kabul, but didn’t. The sheer incompetence was staggering, it’s been two years and no one has been held accountable. Not Biden, not Mark Milley, not Lloyd Austin – who will use their failures and the rise of armed jihadists as an excuse to justify our next misadventure in the Middle East.”
It’s now been two years since the botched Afghanistan withdrawal that left 13 of our sons and daughters dead. $8 billion in US military weapons abandoned and now in the hands of our enemies, including the Taliban. The damage is incalculable. They could’ve waited until after…
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) August 16, 2023
For State Representative Tony Kurtz (R-Wonewoc), a 20-year U.S. Army veteran who served as an attack helicopter pilot in the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War and spent a little time in Afghanistan, the withdrawal was so humiliating, and so unnecessary.
Kurtz (pictured above) said he saw the pain in the eyes of his friend, a veteran named Josh who served in the War on Terror in Afghanistan.
“Just from his eyes, the hurt in his eyes, the feeling of, I don’t want to say guilt, the feeling of betrayal. I think those were all on the table,” Kurtz told The Wisconsin Daily Star on the Vicki McKenna Show. “I think if you talk to anyone who served in Afghanistan for any length of time, they were in disbelief about the humiliation of that withdrawal.”
The painful images of Aug. 15, 2021 remain fixed in time and memory. In a fierce attack, the Taliban completed its recapture of Afghanistan nearly 20 years after the United States military opened its Global War on Terror amid the ashes of the Sept. 11, 2011 terrorist attacks. The surge in Kabul forced U.S. and allied forces and as many Afghan friends as they could take into a chaotic escape from the main Afghanistan airport — two weeks before the scheduled withdrawal.
An “After Action Review” report issued in late June by the U.S. State Department laid the blame of the chaotic departure at the Biden and Trump administrations, citing “insufficient” planning and a lack of communication and decision-making for the disorderly evacuation from Kabul.
“[D]uring both administrations there was insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios and how quickly those might follow,” the 24-page unclassified report states. Another 60 pages, contained in the classified version, were omitted.
White House officials had little to say on why the president did not, at the very least, issue a statement acknowledging the anniversary. They told the Examiner that “the anniversary of the withdrawal being completed is the end of the month.”
“President Biden has spoken on many occasions — and given several public addresses from the White House — about how ending our longest war after 20 years was the right thing to do,” a senior White House official said in a statement. The official insisted that the nation is stronger today because of the U.S. exit from Afghanistan.
That is not the consensus of many. Critics say the graceless departure has emboldened despotic China and Russia to ratchet up their aggressive postures over the past two years, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
As for the blame game, Biden was commander-in-chief at the time of the collapse. His Pentagon was in charge.
The impacts of the disaster continue to be felt.The casualties include the president’s polling numbers.
As Axios reported on the one-year anniversary of the fall of Kabul, Biden’s approval rating was 49 percent at the start of August 2021, according to Gallup polling. A month later, after the completion of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, it was 43 percent. A year ago, it was 38 percent. Today, his approval rating is just under 41 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Of course, the wounds run so much deeper than politics.
Untold numbers of Afghanistan citizens, loyal allies of the U.S., remain trapped, many facing deprivation and death, in the Taliban-controlled nation.
Western Wisconsin’s Fort McCoy, like several military installations, became a makeshift temporary residence for thousands of Afghan refugees.
“These are all the domino effects from that horrible decision to withdraw and the way we withdrew,” Kurtz said. “People don’t realize Tomah [WI, home to Fort McCoy] is roughly 10,000 people. Overnight that city more than doubled.”
The Army veteran and state lawmaker called the disastrous withdrawal a “self-inflicted wound” by the president.
“It could have been completely different and should have been completely different,” Kurtz said.
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M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
