Biden's "America First" Administration

Biden is breaking his promises and betraying refugees. Does anyone care?

If you read just one thing this week, make it this devastating piece by George Packer on America’a badly bungled and unforgivably immoral withdrawal from Afghanistan. I’ve found the Afghanistan withdrawal entirely enraging to discuss, particularly with the many behind-the-laptop political commentators who have rarely ventured out of New York or DC, who see the world through the lens of American domestic politics, and who have experienced very little in the way of material discomfort in their lives.

Much of the progressive reaction to anyone who criticizes the Afghanistan withdrawal is a reflexive accusation of war-mongering: If you say the withdrawal was bungled, then you must want the US to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. If you say that Biden should have managed the withdrawal better, that’s a pretext for blood-thirst — there was no good way to get out, this argument goes, and the Biden administration couldn’t turn Afghanistan into a haven for human rights overnight. The thinking is very binary: If you object to how the US got out, then you must object generally to the US getting out.

As if caring about all the people we could have helped, all the promises we broke, and the humanitarian wasteland we left behind is some sort of performative cover for a deeper desire to simply wage war. It is truly, disgustingly cynical, this idea that the journalists, antiwar veterans, human rights activists, and humanitarian workers who have spent time in Afghanistan are secretly desirous of forever war, and not advocating for exactly what they say they are advocating for: Protection of vulnerable people, including mass resettlement in the United States of those whose lives are now threatened by the Taliban.

Two things can exist at once: You can want the US to end its forever wars, and you can care about how they do it — and believe that the US should prioritize saving lives, meeting our obligations, and getting as many people out of harm’s way as possible. The problem in Afghanistan isn’t that we left, although many people — myself not among them — believe we should have stayed much longer. The problem is that we left without putting the necessary mechanisms into place to protect and / or resettle the many, many people who helped us, and the many, many people who believed our promises about backing those who fought for democracy and the attendant rights of women and minorities.

The failures did not begin with Biden, but they continued with his administration. He did not cure the clear defects or clear away the bureaucratic hurdles before pushing forward with a swift withdrawal. The Trump administration, driven by the acute racism and xenophobia of Stephen Miller, systematically dismantled much of America’s refugee resettlement bureaucracy — just anecdotally, I spent the early part of the Trump years living in Kenya, and it was shocking to see how quickly most of the folks I knew working in refugee resettlement were out of their jobs after Trump took office. Refugee resettlement ground to a trickle. And the Trump administration made a series of bad and cynical deals on Afghanistan, which left Biden’s hands partly tied.

But the Biden administration did not take the time, or even make the effort, to restore the resettlement bureaucracy before pulling out of Afghanistan, even though they knew that the withdrawal would leave many people in need of American aid and safe harbor.

It’s been profoundly disappointing to see so many progressives, who claim the mantle of human rights and feminism, shrugging off this spectacular and avoidable failure because it happened under a president they support, in the context of the wind-down of a war they justifiably wanted to end.