The Morning Dispatch: Biden Defends Afghanistan Strategy

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Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• President Joe Biden addressed the nation Monday on the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. He defended his decision to withdraw, blamed the situation on his predecessor, criticized Afghanistan’s political leadership, and said, “It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not.”

• The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is opening an investigation into Tesla’s autopilot system, citing 11 incidents in which Teslas have crashed into emergency vehicles that were responding to earlier accidents.

• Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin and his cabinet have resigned after Yassin lost majority support in the country’s parliament. Yassin had governed with a slim majority since March 2020. The country is experiencing a surge in COVID-19 cases, the economy has suffered because of lockdowns, and Yassin has had to contend with infighting in his governing coalition. 

• Starting in October, food stamp recipients will see their monthly benefits boosted by more than 25 percent. The Biden administration announced the increase, which is permanent and the largest in the program’s history, on Monday.

• A rocket was fired from Gaza into Israel on Monday, the first since the 11-day conflict between Hamas and Israel in May. No one claimed responsibility, but various outlets reported it could be in retaliation for a clash between Israeli police and Palestinians Monday that left four Palestinians dead. The rocket was intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome defense system.

• The Judiciary Committee of the New York State Assembly will continue its sexual harassment investigation of Gov. Andrew Cuomo even after he resigns, lawmakers said Monday. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Democrat, had previously said that the investigation would end when Cuomo stepped down.

• Federal officials have declared a water shortage in Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the Colorado River basin, triggering reductions in supply to Arizona, Nevada, and northern Mexico starting in 2022. 

• The death toll from the Haitian earthquake topped 1,400 on Monday. Search and rescue teams are continuing to look for survivors, but they are also preparing for Tropical Depression Grace, which could dump up to 15 inches of rain in some areas by the end of Tuesday.

Biden Speaks on Afghanistan

As chaos unfolded on the streets of Kabul Sunday, the U.S. commander in chief was nowhere to be found. President Biden spent the weekend at Camp David, where other than a paper statement from the White House Saturday he was out of the public eye. 

When the president finally addressed the nation Monday—more than 24 hours after the fall of Afghanistan’s capital—the final words of his prepared remarks were met with a cacophony of reporter inquiries. None were answered, but many need addressing.

In his speech, Biden blamed former President Donald Trump for allegedly tying his administration’s hands, indicted the Afghan security forces for lacking resolve, declared ostensible victory over al-Qaeda, and—perhaps most baffling—placed responsibility on Afghan refugees now trapped under Taliban rule for their own plight. “I know that there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghans—civilians sooner,” Biden said. “Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier—still hopeful for their country.” Even if this dubious claim were true, it might be explained by the many times Biden himself—or others speaking on his behalf—reassured Afghans that a Taliban takeover was highly unlikely and that Afghans who had worked with U.S. and coalition forces would be protected. Still, before Biden spoke, more than 80,000 Afghans had applied for special U.S. visas to facilitate their departure from the country. 

The scenes of despair and confusion at Hamid Karzai Airport suggest many Afghans were desperate enough to risk their lives to escape. Thousands of Afghan families fled on foot, jumped guarded walls, and crowded the tarmac in an effort to escape jihadist advances. At least seven people have been killed in the turmoil, some by U.S. troops and others by attempting to cling to departing jets. In addition to reports of Taliban fighters going door-to-door to execute and arrest those with ties to the Afghan government or foreign entities, there have also been stories of rampant sexual violence.

“I stand squarely behind my decision,” Biden said.

Zarifa Ghafari, Afghanistan’s youngest and first female mayor, told iNews that she now fears for her life and the lives of her family members amid the takeover. “I’m sitting here waiting for them to come. There is no one to help me or my family,” Ghafari said. “I’m just sitting with them and my husband. And they will come for people like me and kill me. I can’t leave my family. And anyway, where would I go?” 

“The Afghans now at the greatest risk are the same ones who have been on the forefront of progress inside their nation. President Biden has promised to evacuate these Afghans, along with American citizens and our allies,” former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, said Monday in a rare statement. “The United States government has the legal authority to cut the red tape for refugees during urgent humanitarian crises. And we have the responsibility and the resources to secure safe passage for them now, without bureaucratic delay.”

Also on Monday, the Pentagon called up another 1,000 troops to assist in the evacuation of American citizens and Afghans eligible for Special Immigrant Visas from Kabul. Many outgoing Afghan refugees will eventually arrive in Fort Lee, Virginia, for processing before their relocation to states across the country.

“We believe that we can effectuate an ongoing evacuation of American citizens, of Afghans who worked for us—including interpreters and translators—and other vulnerable Afghans at risk,” White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told ABC’s Good Morning America Monday. “We are working to do that—first, by securing the airport today. And then, in the days ahead, by taking people out one flight at a time, flight after flight. We fully intend to continue an evacuation process to bring out people who worked alongside of us in Afghanistan.”

But reporting throughout the day and overnight suggests this will be a very difficult task. “As the situation on the ground in Afghanistan’s capital continues to deteriorate, thousands of U.S. citizens are trapped in and around Kabul with no ability to get to the airport, which is their only way out of the country,” reports Josh Rogin, a global affairs columnist at the Washington Post. “As Taliban soldiers go door to door, searching for Westerners, these U.S. citizens are now reaching out to anyone and everyone back in Washington for help.”

The Taliban have set up checkpoints around the airport, preventing the safe passage of Americans and U.S. allies desperate to escape the coming violence. Perhaps as a reflection of this reality, the US Embassy in Kabul tweeted a warning, urging stranded Americans to stay away from the airport and to fill out a State Department form online.

“It is certainly the case that the speed with which cities fell was much greater than anyone anticipated, including the Afghans, including many of the analysts who looked hard at this problem,” Sullivan acknowledged.

Still, Biden maintained that his national security team’s surprise was not for lack of preparedness, insisting that it had “planned for every contingency.” 

According to Jason Killmeyer, former chief of staff of global defense, security, and justice at Deloitte, the president’s claim misses the reality on the ground. “He conflates contingency planning with basic planning for our post-withdrawal posture,” Killmeyer told The Dispatch. “Basic details of our support to the now-deposed government went unanswered, same for specifics of the counterterrorism plan.”

Sen. Ben Sasse, Republican from Nebraska, blasted Biden’s speech and urged him to focus on the immediate task at hand. “President Biden failed to rise to the occasion. There’s an ongoing crisis at the Kabul airport, and Americans didn’t need to hear his 2020 campaign speech—we needed to hear strength and clarity from the commander-in-chief,” said Sasse. “We need to clear the Taliban from that airport using overwhelming strength, we need to expand the perimeter around our people, and we need to hold that line until every last one of our people and heroic allies who sacrificed for us are out of harm’s way.”

Sen. Mitt Romney also criticized Biden’s “failure to acknowledge his disastrous withdrawal,” and argued that his justification of the retreat was a false choice: “Contrary to his claims, our choice was not between a hasty and ill-prepared retreat or staying forever.”

Leaning on oft-repeated talking points, Biden also insisted that the Afghan security forces were “trained and equipped,” “a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies,” but simply “not willing to fight for themselves.” What this narrative leaves out is the sudden retraction of American logistical and intelligence support. As Thomas Joscelyn explains in this helpful Twitter thread, between the demoralizing U.S. withdrawal and delegitimizing forced diplomacy, the Afghan security forces were fighting a losing battle against the Taliban. 

Additional information may emerge—and indeed, reports already exist—of the role that corruption within the ranks of the Afghan forces played in their surrender. But Biden’s portrayal of the U.S. as a passive actor in the security situation of Afghanistan is misleading, as is his indictment of Afghan soldiers, who sustained massive casualties attempting to ward off the Taliban’s advance.

Reflecting on the U.S. military’s objective for entering Afghanistan in 2001, Biden made his final case for closing the chapter. “We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on September 11th, 2001, and make sure al-Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again,” he said. “We did that.”

We didn’t. Al-Qaeda fighters remained in Afghanistan during the entirety of the two decades of war there. Many who were captured have been released, including some 5,000 al Qaeda and Taliban fighters whose release the Trump administration included in the February 2020 “peace deal” with the Taliban. Many top al-Qaeda leaders have sworn blood oaths to the successive heads of the Taliban, and others, including Sirajuddin Haqqani, who has a $10 million price on his head from the U.S. government, serve as leaders of both groups.

“The Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is the best news al-Qaeda has had in decades. With the Taliban back in charge of the country, it is virtually certain that al-Qaeda will reestablish a safe haven in Afghanistan and use it to plot attacks on the United States,” Nathan Sales, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, wrote in an expert briefing. “The terrorist group responsible for 9/11 will soon find itself flush with cash looted from Afghanistan’s central bank, with weapons seized from the defeated Afghan army, and with fighters freed from prison.”

What to Make of the Latest Census Data

The U.S. census is one of our most venerable institutions—a great national bean-counting enshrined in the original text of the Constitution and carried out every 10 years since. But the 2020 census—our 24th, for those keeping score—has had a hard time catching a break. First, there were the attendant difficulties of trying to tally the population amid a global pandemic, which significantly delayed the results and has caused massive headaches for congressional candidates across the country who still aren’t quite sure where their districts are going to lie by 2022. And now the findings are finally coming out, in the typically slow news month of August—only to be immediately buried by a slew of newsier happenings, from multitrillion-dollar legislative fights in Congress to the collapse of Afghanistan.

The Census Bureau released its first batch of topline numbers, the raw headcount used to determine how many congressional seats belong to each state, back in April. (A quick refresher: The U.S. topped 331 million people, up from 308 million in 2010. California, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York each lost one seat, while Florida, North Carolina, Colorado, Oregon, and Montana each picked up one; Texas gained two.)

But most of the information of particular interest to demographers and political strategists wasn’t released until last week, when the Census Bureau shared a much more detailed batch of data on age, race, and other demographic factors. Accordingly, we know now that America hasn’t just gotten larger—it’s also gotten older and more diverse.

The age data is straightforward. We already had a sense from April’s data that U.S. fertility had continued to slow over the last decade; the overall population growth of just north of 7 percent over 10 years was the slowest on record. But the latest age data shone a glaring spotlight on that phenomenon: Over the last 10 years, the total number of children living in America actually decreased, from 74.2 million in 2010 to 73.1 million in 2020. By comparison, the U.S. has 258.3 million adults, up from 234.6 million a year ago.

The census’s racial data was equally striking, although somewhat harder to parse. Here, increased diversity across the board was the story of the decade. The share of Americans who identified themselves as white only dropped to 57.8 percent of the population. As in prior years, America’s growing minority population was primarily driven by growth among Hispanics, who since 1990 have gone from 9 percent to 18.7 percent of the U.S. population. Asians, too, have roughly doubled their share of the population since 1990, and now make up 6.1 percent of Americans.

Remarkably, the population of white Americans didn’t just shrink relative to other groups. The census figures showed an absolute decrease of about 5 million white people compared with 2010 data. It was the first time America’s white population as recorded in census data had ever shrunk, dating back to 1790.

It’s difficult to know exactly what lessons to draw from this finding—in part because at least some of the change is likely attributable to changes in the construction of the census itself, which made it easier last year for respondents to record their racial identity in more granular detail. The number of people identifying themselves as belonging to more than one race jumped from about 9 million in 2010 to about 33 million last year; the number of people reporting themselves as white only or white in combination increased compared to the last census. It’s difficult to say, in other words, whether a shrinking white population on the census represents a white population that is shrinking in earnest or simply an increased share in people who identified themselves as white only in 2010 but as white in combination in 2020.

There’s plenty of reason to believe, however, that the phenomenon is not purely an accounting blip. More people died than were born in half of U.S. counties over the past decade, an effect that was most pronounced in rural areas where white people disproportionately live. Other phenomena have also contributed to lower birth rates among white people in recent years, from the opioid epidemic afflicting many rural and small-town areas to habitually smaller families, started later, among many professional-class people.

These topline numbers are interesting and will doubtless play into national policy debates in the future. But for now, political operatives are busy poring over the local-level demographic breakdowns that will form the basis of partisan strategy over how to gerrymander districts to give whichever party is in power an edge. 

“We’re seeing so much more of this ‘two or more races,’” data analyst Kimball Brace told the Washington Post in regards to the racial identity question. “And that increase is significant because it will start muddying the waters a bit when we get to the question of drawing districts and the creation of different minority seats, and will it be an African American or a Hispanic seat? Because things are starting to merge together.” 

Worth Your Time

• When photojournalist Lynsey Addario first traveled to Afghanistan in 2000, she documented women running secret schools for girls and families staging underground weddings—music, dancing, and mixed-gender gatherings were banned under the Taliban. Ten years later, she recalls, she rode around with an Afghan actress whose hair and makeup were on full display as ”she blasted Iranian music and danced with her hands around the steering wheel.” In a piece for The Atlantic, Addario wonders how women will fare under the Taliban this time around. “The Taliban cannot take away who Afghan women have become in the past 20 years—their education, their drive to work, their taste of freedom,” Addario writes.

• In a piece for The National Interest, Michael Rubin argues that the Taliban’s ability to maintain control over the territory it has claimed might not be permanent. He points to the fact that Afghanistan’s neighbors (aside from Pakistan) live in fear of the Taliban and so will likely back militias and warlords who could take control of border regions and create a buffer. And then there’s Iran, which could seek to install a proxy in the culturally Persian city of Herat. “Get ready for the next phase in the Afghan civil war,” he writes.

• Late last week, the Biden administration told Americans that Kabul was not in imminent danger of takeover by the Taliban. On Sunday, we woke up to the news that President Ashraf Ghani had fled the country and collapse was imminent. In the Washington Post, Susannah George details how the Taliban took advantage of the uncertainty created by its 2020 deal with the Trump administration, which left many Afghan soldiers demoralized. Afghan police officers who hadn’t been paid in months were only too happy to take bribes from the Taliban.’ “‘Without the United States, there was no fear of being caught for corruption. It brought out the traitors from within our military,” said one Afghan police officer.” 

Presented Without Comment

Also Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• Is President Biden to blame for the collapse in Afghanistan? Did he ignore warnings that withdrawal would result in a Taliban takeover? Eli Lake joins Jonah on The Remnant to answer those questions and more.

• On the website today, Matthew Kroenig and Jeffrey Cimmino argue that the debacle in Afghanistan isn’t just bad for the obvious reasons, but also because it will undermine the Biden administration’s own foreign policy goals.

Let Us Know

The New York legislature’s flip-flopping on its inquiry into allegations of sexual harassment by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, which lawmakers previously said would lapse after Cuomo resigned before changing their minds yesterday, is eerily reminiscent of the wrangling over whether Donald Trump’s impeachment could go forward once his term had ended. Setting aside the political calculation involved, is it better for such investigations to complete their work even once their target has left office? Or are they a waste of official time and taxpayer expense once the political outcome becomes moot?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), Harvest Prude (@HarvestPrude), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).