Is it a logistical triumph, an unmitigated disaster, or something in between? It depends on who you ask. With days to go until U.S. forces vacate Afghanistan, Joe Biden’s critics continue to blast him for the “intense humanitarian crisis” playing out there, and they’re not wrong to do so. Chaos continues to reign in Kabul, with Americans and vulnerable Afghans still struggling to get out, and the likelihood of rescuing them all by August 31 is looking remote. But the administration has dramatically accelerated evacuations, getting nearly 71,000 people out of the country in just 10 days—a “success,” as White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki described it Tuesday, for which team Biden feels it hasn’t gotten enough credit.
“This is now on track…to be the largest airlift in U.S. history,” Psaki told reporters Tuesday. “I would not say that is anything but a success.” “Tuesday of last week it seemed like the Taliban at any moment was going to start murdering people,” a foreign policy operative in touch with the administration told Politico. “It looked like a total, total disaster…But we’re getting tens of thousands of people out and it looks a lot better.” “Lots of work still to do,” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy tweeted Monday, “but it might be time for a bit of a reassessment by the media of this operation given the actual results.”
Indeed, to the White House and its allies, what’s playing out in Afghanistan right now is no longer Saigon in 1975, but the Berlin airlift. It’s not a welcome-but-poorly-executed end to a 20-year war, but the “best-run evacuation from a war America lost,” as MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell described it Tuesday. It’s not a bad situation getting better, but a “tremendous piece of work,” as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told ABC News’ This Week on Sunday.
But while the administration may, indeed, be outpacing the evacuation goals it set, and some of the criticism it has faced has been unfair, not all of it has been. Any scrutiny of Biden’s exit that does not account for the two decades of mismanagement that led to this point is incomplete. And while it’s likely true that any withdrawal would’ve been messy, Biden clearly did not anticipate or fully prepare for the quick Taliban takeover, despite reported warnings from U.S. intelligence. The current evacuation scramble is a testament to the administration’s failure to get Americans and allies out earlier. The U.S. has made admirable progress in recent days, but the situation on the ground is still horrific, and reports suggest it is deteriorating for those who remain. “I don’t think the president’s rhetoric matches the conditions on the ground,” Jenna Ben-Yehuda, a former State Department official under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told Politico.
To be sure, some of the commentary from Biden’s critics doesn’t quite jibe with reality either. The way Donald Trump and Co. make it sound, the U.S. was doing a bang-up job in Afghanistan for two decades until Biden came along and screwed everything up. That’s clearly untrue. But the fact that some of the ugliness was outside his control shouldn’t make him immune to criticism of how he’s executed that exit, which he and his allies have tended to conflate with criticism of the exit itself. And while his administration has been more successful lately in getting people out of the country, the job isn’t done—and it isn’t clear how much work is left, or if it’s even possible to get everyone evacuated at this point. Biden has suggested all Americans and allies will be brought to safety by the deadline, which he has stood by, even as lawmakers and international leaders encourage him to extend it. “We are currently on a pace to finish by August the 31st,” Biden said in remarks at the White House Tuesday. “The sooner we can finish, the better.”
But even some Democrats have questioned whether that deadline can be met. “I think it’s possible, but I think it’s very unlikely given the number of Americans who still need to be evacuated, the number of [Special Immigrant Visas], the number of others who are members of the Afghan press, civil society leaders, women leaders,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff told reporters after a briefing Tuesday. “It’s hard for me to imagine all of that can be accomplished between now and the end of the month,” Schiff continued, encouraging Biden to extend the withdrawal deadline and urging an accounting of what went wrong. “With respect to the objective of standing up a government that would earn the support of the Afghan people, that mission failed, and we have to ask ourselves some very difficult questions about why.”
— How the U.S. Abandoned Women in Afghanistan
— Billionaire Leon Black Flew a Russian Model to Meet Jeffrey Epstein
— Inside the Fury and Fantasy of Donald Trump’s Florida
— How Rudy Giuliani Went From 9/11’s Hallowed Mayor to 2021’s Haunted Ghoul
— How One New Jersey Town Became a Magnet for the Media Elite
— Is Ron DeSantis’s Fox News Obsession Backfiring on Florida?
— Congress Will Soon Get Its Hands on Possible Evidence of Trump’s Many Alleged Crimes
— How the “Ground Zero Mosque” Meltdown Set the Table for Trump
— From the Archive: Into the Valley of Death
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.