More Pundits, Experts Come Out Defending Biden's Handling Of Afghanistan
"This would not have been pretty no matter what happened,” Pulitzer winner says
President Biden's been taking a drubbing in the media, and from Republicans, for weeks now over his handling of events in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, his administration has overseen the evacuation of some 120,000 US and Afghan citizens to safety.
Although there have been no American civilian casualties in the operation, 13 US service members were killed last week in suicide bombings outside of the airport in Afghanistan's capital city of Kabul.
Still, criticism of Biden has been so fierce that some Republicans have called for his resignation or impeachment.
On the other side, the president's defenders have appeared to be far more infrequent in number and lower in volume than his critics.
More Biden supporters are speaking up, however, backing the president's difficult choices left by an agreement with the brutal Taliban struck last year by the Trump administration.
“When you’re the president and it happens on your watch, you’re ultimately accountable. But I do think we ought to have a little perspective here. First of all, this is a 20-year war. This is what withdrawal from a war we did not win looks like. It’s messy. It’s awful,” Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson said, referring to the nearly 20-year US occupation of Afghanistan which began after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “The people we have to deal with that are taking over are the people we were fighting, and we don’t like it at all. It’s not a pretty thing to look at. It’s a tragic thing for a lot of Afghans, for a lot of people — certainly for the 13 service members who lost their lives and their families. But it’s never pretty. This would not have been pretty no matter what happened.”
It's “ludicrous” for anyone in the Biden administration to take the fall for the events which have transpired during the evacuation and US exit from Afghanistan, according to David Rothkopf, a journalist, podcaster and visiting professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
"That’s just ludicrous. The amount of success that they have had in dealing with very difficult circumstances is enormous. And frankly, I think a lot of those critics are covering their own ground,” Rothkopf said. “Many of those people are Bush administration officials or Obama administration officials or Trump administration officials who created the circumstances that we’re in. The problem is not all we’ve done in the past two weeks. The problem is what we’ve done in the last 20 years.”
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