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PRESENTED BY

BY JOHN BRESNAHAN, ANNA PALMER AND JAKE SHERMAN
WITH MAX COHEN AND CHRISTIAN HALL

THE TOP

Good morning. The United States lost more than 2,400 troops in Afghanistan, with another 3,400-plus contractors killed as well. More than 20,000 Americans were injured. Tens of thousands of Afghans were killed and wounded. The U.S. government spent more than $1 trillion during nearly two decades of conflict. And what do we have to show for it?

The Taliban controls Afghanistan once again, just as if Operation Enduring Freedom had never occurred. The Afghan military, recipients of more than $80 billion in U.S. equipment and training, melted away in just days. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani — who sat in the Oval Office with President Joe Biden in late June to discuss the fate of his nation once U.S. and coalition forces departed — has fled. With a growing diplomatic, military and political disaster on his hands, Biden has ordered six thousand U.S. troops back to Kabul to help evacuate American personnel and the thousands of Afghan allies who fear reprisal at the hands of the Taliban. The Kabul airport has been overrun with civilians desperately trying to flee, while U.S. diplomats have pulled down the flag from the $700 million American embassy and are headed home.

And now it’s up to a stunned White House and bitterly divided Congress to sift through a debacle that each of the last four presidents and hundreds of lawmakers co-own. 

The Biden administration spent the last few days trying to tell us that, in fact, most Americans don’t care about what’s going on in Afghanistan. Several figures in Biden’s universe said privately they have the polling to prove it. But it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that leaving a country in the hands of the Taliban — which has one of the worst human rights records in the world and a history of harboring terror groups — is bad no matter what public polling says. 

Like the three presidents before him, the Southwest Asian nation will dominate at least a chunk of his time in office. And it will also dominate the foreign policy conversation on Capitol Hill for the foreseeable future.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chief Chair Mark Milley briefed House members on Sunday. Democrats and Republicans were critical. Just two GOP lawmakers were permitted to question the administration, and several complained to us after that they were waiting in the cue but not permitted to talk. Another briefing will be held next week when the House returns to consider a budget resolution and voting rights legislation. 

Republicans, of course, blame Biden for the Afghanistan debacle, with some calling for his resignation. They also accused the president of “hiding” out at Camp David and refusing to go on camera to discuss the situation. While those kinds of histrionics are easily ignored, Biden’s recent series of comments on Afghanistan will be replayed endlessly, part of an effort to portray him as an overwhelmed president incapable of doing the job.

Most damaging is a July 8 press conference where Biden dismissed the possibility of a Taliban takeover. Biden also downplayed the comparison to South Vietnam, saying Americans would never see an image of U.S. helicopters plucking people off rooftops in Afghanistan, similar to what happened in Saigon in 1975. Which is what happened on Sunday, just five weeks later, when American forces took embassy staff out of the U.S. compound. This video was played on repeat Sunday. 

“There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of [an] embassy… of the United States from Afghanistan,” Biden said then.

There were only a couple of statements from Democrats on Sunday that directly defended Biden or the administration’s handling of the situation. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) called the Taliban victory “inevitable,” which clearly doesn’t fit in with the White House messaging.

“It is abundantly clear that the Taliban’s advance was ultimately inevitable, at least without a commitment to surge tens of thousands of U.S. troops for an unknown span of time. That is a commitment the American public has made clear it does not support,” Meeks said in a statement.

One Democrat who did defend Biden was Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), although it was more in the vein of “Biden was right to follow Trump’s decision to end the war.”

“Our priority now needs to be evacuating American personnel and as many of our Afghan partners as humanly possible,” Murphy said in a statement. “But I firmly believe that President Biden made the right decision by standing by the Trump administration’s decision to bring our troops home and end the longest war in our nation’s history.”

There were several other Democrats — mainly veterans — who blamed both the Trump and Biden administrations for the fiasco.

Rep. Kai Kahele (D-Hawaii), who served as a C-17 pilot in Afghanistan and Iraq, said “Decisions made by previous and current administrations have put the United States in a calamitous situation and swift, decisive decisions must be made immediately.

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass), an Iraq combat veteran who briefly ran for president, issued a blistering statement that hit everyone involved.

“To say that today is anything short of a disaster would be dishonest. Worse, it was avoidable,” Moulton said. “The time to debate whether we stay in Afghanistan has passed, but there is still time to debate how we manage our retreat. I’ve have been calling on the Administration to evacuate our allies immediately — not wait for paperwork, for shaky agreements with third countries, or for time to make it look more ‘orderly.’”

More Moulton: “We should also not forget that the tragedy that unfolds before us today was set in motion by Secretary of State Pompeo and President Trump, who negotiated in secret with the Taliban terrorists last year in order to meet a campaign promise.”

The Coverage

→ Front page news analysis in the NYT by David Sanger: “For Biden, Images of Defeat He Wanted to Avoid”: “Rarely in modern presidential history have words come back to bite an American commander in chief as swiftly as these from President Biden a little more than five weeks ago: ‘There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States in Afghanistan.’

“Then, digging the hole deeper, he added, ‘The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.’

“On Sunday, the scramble to evacuate American civilians and embassy employees from Kabul — the very image that Mr. Biden and his aides agreed they had to avoid during recent meetings in the Oval Office — unfolded live on television, not from the U.S. Embassy roof but from the landing pad next to the building. And now that the Afghan government has collapsed with astonishing speed, the Taliban seem certain to be back in full control of the country when the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is commemorated less than a month from today — exactly as they were 20 summers ago.

“Mr. Biden will go down in history, fairly or unfairly, as the president who presided over a long-brewing, humiliating final act in the American experiment in Afghanistan. After seven months in which his administration seemed to exude much-needed competence — getting more than 70 percent of the country’s adults vaccinated, engineering surging job growth and making progress toward a bipartisan infrastructure bill — everything about America’s last days in Afghanistan shattered the imagery.”

→ NYT’s David Zucchino: “Kabul’s Sudden Fall to Taliban Ends U.S. Era in Afghanistan”: “Two decades after American troops invaded Afghanistan to root out Qaeda terrorists who attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, the American nation-building experiment was in ruins — undercut by misguided and often contradictory policies and by a relentless insurgency whose staying power had been profoundly underestimated by U.S. military planners.”

→ WSJ’s Michael Gordon: “​​Biden’s Afghanistan Exit Raises Questions About His Foreign-Policy Record”: “During the 2020 political campaign, President Biden presented himself as a globe-trotting leader who had helmed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, served as President Barack Obama’s point man on complex international issues and who was determined to bring a steady hand to national security.

“Yet the turmoil that has engulfed Afghanistan, which has led Mr. Biden to send 5,000 troops back to the country, roughly doubling the force he decided in April to take out, has confronted the White House with a crisis that could have lasting humanitarian and national-security consequences, former officials say.”

→ WaPo: “Reports of several dead, chaos at Kabul airport amid scramble to flee Taliban,” by Rachel Pannett, Jennifer Hassan and Katerina Ang

→ WaPo: “Defiant and defensive, a president known for empathy takes a cold-eyed approach to Afghanistan debacle,” by Anne Gearan and Cleve Wootson

→ FT’s Gideon Rachman: “Afghanistan is now part of the post-American world”: “With the US out of the way, the Taliban will seek to build relations with an array of other actors, including China, Pakistan and the Gulf states. Afghanistan’s new rulers seem eager for international recognition, and the trade and aid that would flow from that. That desire might yet persuade the Taliban to moderate its more fanatical impulses.”

WHAT AMERICA IS WAKING UP TO

This is what defeat looks like

BEHIND THE SCENES

McCarthy calls for congressional probes into Afghanistan debacle

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told us Sunday that Congress needs to investigate the Biden administration’s execution of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, calling it a “mistake that will haunt us for decades.”

McCarthy was one of only two Republicans who spoke out during a classified briefing on Sunday on Afghanistan with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley. The other was Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.), an Army veteran. McCarthy unloaded on Biden’s withdrawal strategy. 

McCarthy is a close ally of Donald Trump, and he didn’t have a ton of criticism when the former president cut a deal with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan by May 2021, so we wondered just what he thought Biden did wrong.

We asked McCarthy about his Biden criticism and what he would’ve done differently.

→ McCarthy said Biden shouldn’t have been “so public” about the departure date of U.S. forces. Furthermore, McCarthy said the president shouldn’t have drawn down U.S. forces “during the summer, when [the Taliban is] at their height.”

→ McCarthy said U.S. forces should’ve bombed and destroyed all of their military equipment upon withdrawal so the Taliban was unable to take it. 

→ The California Republican said he would’ve kept a “small number of troops” to maintain control of Bagram air base.

→ McCarthy insisted he’ll push for investigations into Biden’s handling of the withdrawal. The California Republican wants to see the intelligence assessment that led to Biden bringing home U.S. troops, and he wants to understand how the Afghan army fell so apart fast after two decades of American-sponsored training.

McCarthy: “How does the rest of the world look at us? They like that the president doesn’t tweet but they don’t; think America is very tough.”

ALTERNATE HISTORY

Democrats focus on Trump’s role in Afghanistan

For Democrats, former President Donald Trump is as much or more to blame for the Afghanistan collapse as President Joe Biden.

They point to the agreement that Trump and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reached with the Taliban in early 2020 to pull U.S. forces out by May 2021. They note there’s nothing in that document that calls for a “conditions-based withdrawal” that Trump now says he would’ve implemented, while also pointing to the fact that Trump was already dramatically cutting the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan before he left office.

Trump, in fact, complained four months ago that Biden wasn’t moving fast enough in implementing the agreement that he cut.

“Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do,” Trump said on April 19. “I planned to withdraw on May 1st, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible.”

Trump has now called on Biden to resign.

Pompeo wasn’t having any of it, saying on “Fox News Sunday” that “I wouldn’t have let my 10-year-old son get away from this kind of pathetic blame-shifting."

A number of Republicans were critical of Trump’s agreement. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rejected it as a poor policy decision. And Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) criticized both presidents in April.

“We will see if ‘General’ Biden and ‘General’ Trump’s withdrawal strategy turns out to be sound national security policy,” Graham said at the time.

THE INSIDE GAME

Pelosi’s budget and infrastructure play falls flat with moderates

Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a long and detailed “Dear Colleague” letter Sunday, detailing her new plan to pass the budget and infrastructure package. Here’s the letter, and here’s the part you need to pay attention to:

Our goal is to pass the budget resolution the week of August 23rd so that we may pass Democrats’ Build Back Better agenda via reconciliation as soon as possible.  To that end, I have requested that the Rules Committee explore the possibility of a rule that advances both the budget resolution and the bipartisan infrastructure package.  This will put us on a path to advance the infrastructure bill and the reconciliation bill.

Let us translate here. If you don’t already know — and you probably do —  the “rule” is the resolution that controls House floor debate on a specific piece of legislation. It’s usually quite restrictive and always favors the majority. Pelosi is attempting to have the Rules Committee — which she controls — draft a resolution that would detail the debate for both the infrastructure bill and the budget resolution. 

This is essentially an attempt to twin the two proposals so moderates and liberals have to vote to allow both of them on the floor. Moderates had been threatening, of course, to tank the rule to force Pelosi to backpedal and schedule a vote on the infrastructure bill before the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package. 

The moderates, though, want nothing to do with this strategy. Instead, they’re standing up to Pelosi, which is not something we see too often. Here’s a statement from Democratic Reps. Josh Gottheimer (N.J.), Filemon Vela (Texas), Henry Cuellar (Texas), Ed Case (Hawaii), Kurt Schrader (Ore.), Carolyn Bordeaux (Ga.), Jared Golden (Maine), Vicente Gonzalez (Texas) and Jim Costa (Calif.):

“While we appreciate the forward procedural movement on the bipartisan infrastructure agreement, our view remains consistent: We should vote first on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework without delay and then move to immediate consideration of the budget resolution.

“As the President echoed after the infrastructure bill passed the Senate, we must get shovels in the ground and people to work. This once-in-a-century bipartisan infrastructure legislation will fix our roads, bridges, rails and tunnels; it will invest in broadband connectivity and green energy and address climate change. It will help create two million jobs a year and has the support of the AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce – not to mention Democrats and Republicans in Congress and across the country. We simply can’t afford any delays. As Democrats, we remain committed to working with our colleagues to advance the President’s agenda, including getting this bill to the President’s desk.” 

In other words, give us a vote on infrastructure first — period, thank you very much. The stare down continues. The House returns one week from today.

MOMENTS

President Joe Biden is at Camp David.

10 a.m.: Biden will receive his daily intelligence briefing.

2 p.m.: State Department spokesman Ned Price will brief in Foggy Bottom.

CLIP FILE

NYT

→ “Biden Administration Prompts Largest Permanent Increase in Food Stamps,” by Jason DeParle

WaPo

→ “Canada’s Trudeau calls snap election in bid to regain parliamentary majority,” by Amanda Coletta in Toronto

→ “Texas Supreme Court sides with Gov. Abbott, temporarily blocking mask mandates,” by Caroline Anders and Max Hauptman

WSJ

→ “Homeland Security Considers Outside Firms to Analyze Social Media After Jan. 6 Failure,” by Rachael Levy

AP

→ “Quake injured wait for help as new disaster overwhelms Haiti,” by Mark Stevenson and Evens Sanon in Les Cayes, Haiti

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Editorial photos provided by Getty Images