The latest revelations on the inner-workings of the president’s mind are beginning to fit a pattern.
Before the Afghan collapse became imminent, President Biden pressed Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on what he saw as a “perception” problem. “I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban,” Biden told his counterpart in a 14-minute phone call on July 23. “And there is a need, whether it’s true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.”
We also now know that the parents of the 13 American soldiers recently killed in Afghanistan were not too keen on meeting with the president, and those who did now regret it. Biden “talked a bit more about his own son than he did my son, and that didn’t sit well with me,” said one father, who also confirmed that another family member had stronger words for Mr. Biden: “I hope you burn in hell! That was my brother!”
During the transfer ceremony when the flagged-draped coffins of each soldier were taken off the military plane that flew their bodies out of Afghanistan, President Biden found it irresistible to check his watch 13 times, one for each dead soldier. “They would release the salute and he looked down at his watch on every last one,” said another father of a fallen soldier. “All 13, he looked down at his watch.”
Ben Shapiro described Joe Biden as a man who can only show empathy when it relates to himself. “If all your empathy really is, is performative … calling upon your own wellspring of personal grief in order to project it out to the world so that people will sympathize with you, that is not you acting empathetically, that is you being an actor. And Joe Biden is an actor.” The only time he shows grief is when it is his grief.
Observed by a former Obama administration official, “[Biden] had that empathy for the people in the Balkans. He even had it for people in Iraq. I never saw it in Afghanistan.”
What President Biden has done to the people of Afghanistan and to the thousands of American soldiers who died fighting for them, is what Christopher Hitchens described as a form of moral treason. This is yet another lesson in the importance of character when electing leaders.
Here is George Packer’s description of his own encounters with the man.
Biden has inherited a set of nearly impossible choices in Afghanistan. He has a complex history there. In 2004, he told me the story of his first trip to the country, soon after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. He toured a new school in Kabul—bitter cold, plastic sheeting over the windows, one light bulb hanging from the ceiling—where a girl stood up at her desk and said, “You cannot leave. They will not deny me learning to read. I will read, and I will be a doctor like my mother. America must stay.” As Biden explained it, the girl was saying, in effect: “Don’t fuck with me, Jack. You got me in here. You said you were going to help me. You’d better not leave me now.” He described meeting the girl as “a catalytic event for me.” For a while he was a leading proponent of nation building in Afghanistan.By the time Biden became vice president in 2009, the disastrous war in Iraq, the endemic corruption of the Afghan government, and the return of the Taliban had made him a deep skeptic of the American commitment. He became the Obama administration’s strongest voice for getting out of Afghanistan. In 2010, he told Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, that the U.S. had to leave Afghanistan regardless of the consequences for women or anyone else. According to Holbrooke’s diary, when he asked about American obligations to Afghans like the girl in the Kabul school, Biden replied with a history lesson from the final U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia in 1973: “Fuck that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.”
Specifically when Holbrooke brought up the subject of women’s rights being threatened under a Taliban-run Afghanistan, “Biden erupted” with more indignation. “I am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights. It just won’t work, that’s not what they’re there for.” Holbrooke wrote that when he suggested that the US could leave a residual force to train and assist Afghan forces, Biden just belittled him, and shifted the discussion to a political context:
He said it ain’t going to happen. He said I don’t understand politics. He said we’re facing a debacle politically. He said we’re going to lose the presidency in 2012 if unemployment remains high, and Afghanistan was the other issue that could pull us down, and we have to be on our way out, that we had to do what we did in Vietnam.
The Washington Post described Biden’s foreign policy approach as one “that is guided largely by impulse and feeling rather than abiding philosophy. And it reflects a decades-long career in which Biden has been all over the map on the biggest questions of war and peace.”
This is the culmination of a legacy, and one that should live in infamy.