How Biden's intellectual shortcomings produced disaster in Afghanistan

I suspect that most of us have known at least one person of average intelligence who forged his way ahead in life through the gift of gab, people skills (with the right people), and unflagging self-confidence (at least on the surface). This can be a winning formula.

It helps if, as this type of person (typically a male) takes on responsibilities that are increasingly complex, he is able to harness the talents of people who understand and can deal with complexity. Of course, this only works if the in-over-his-head boss is willing to listen.

Unfortunately, the same self-confidence that facilitates the boss’ rise can cut against a willingness to listen. So can the desire to demonstrate that his intelligence isn’t just average.

The easiest way to fake intellectual prowess in this context is to deny that matters are as complex as the experts claim. If a problem can be reduced to simple terms, the man-in-charge can more than hold his own.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to simplify matters, and it’s true that experts will sometimes impose layers of complexity just to demonstrate their superiority or usefulness. But when it comes to simplifying, the guiding principle should always be, in the words of Alfred North Whitehead, “seek simplicity and distrust it.”

This brings us to Joe Biden. His disastrous handling of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is covered in two new books. One, by the liberal journalist Franklin Foer, is The Last Politician. It’s due out in September but has already been excerpted by The Atlantic.

The excerpts from Foer’s book are behind a paywall. However, the New York Post summarizes the part pertaining to Afghanistan here.

The essence of the reporting can be found in the Post’s title: “Biden’s ‘swaggering faith in himself’ left White House ill-prepared as Taliban took over Afghanistan.”

The Post writes:

President Biden overestimated his own competence in foreign affairs ahead of the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, making unhelpful and impractical suggestions while displaying a “swaggering faith in himself” that left his administration unprepared for the devastating chaos of the evacuation of Kabul, according to a forthcoming book.

In “The Last Politician,” Franklin Foer says the 80-year-old commander-in-chief “exhibited determination, even stubbornness, despite furious criticism from the establishment figures whose approval he usually craved” over his decision to end the US presence in Afghanistan on Aug. 30, 2021, after two decades.

“When it came to foreign policy,” Foer added, “Joe Biden possessed a swaggering faith in himself.”

So strong was that faith that Biden, once described by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates as having been “wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades,” viewed experienced diplomats and pundits as “risk adverse, beholden to institutions [and] lazy in their thinking,” according to the book.

Speaking of lazy thinking, here, according to Foer, is how Biden thinks about foreign policy:

“One aide recalled that he would say, ‘You foreign policy guys, you think this is all pretty complicated. But it’s just like family dynamics,'” Foer wrote of Biden, adding that in the president’s assessment: “Foreign affairs was sometimes painful, often futile, but really it was emotional intelligence applied to people with names that were difficult to pronounce.”

“Diplomacy, in Biden’s view, was akin to persuading a pain-in-the-ass uncle to stop drinking so much,” Foer added.

This isn’t simplicity; it’s staggering simple-mindedness.

If Foer’s reporting is accurate, Biden uses precisely the tactic to disguise inferior intelligence that I described above. He claims that dealing with foreign affairs requires only emotional intelligence — which he could claim to possess — not expertise or subtlety — which he manifestly lacks.

Denying the existence of complexity, Biden reduced foreign affairs to the level of dealing with ordinary family matters, as if persuading Putin not to invade Ukraine is analogous to persuading an uncle to sober up (and as if Biden has had success in dealing with his son’s substance abuse problems).

Biden’s attempts to micro-manage the Afghanistan withdrawal would be comical, were they not tragic:

Biden’s commitment to his wisdom continued through the hectic evacuation mission, as he reportedly “would pepper [then-Ambassador to Afghanistan John Bass] with ideas for squeezing more evacuees through the gates” of the airport, most of which were all but impossible given the circumstances on the ground.

“The president’s instinct was to throw himself into the intricacies of troubleshooting. ‘Why don’t we have them meet in parking lots? Can’t we leave the airport and pick them up?'” Foer wrote.

Hey, that’s what you would do for an uncle.

“Bass would kick around Biden’s proposed solutions with colleagues to determine their plausibility, which was usually low.”

The problem with many of Biden’s suggestions, in Foer’s words, was that the US “didn’t have the troops or the will to secure Kabul.” Afghan forces had walked away from their positions in the capital without putting up any resistance, while the Americans had abandoned the larger Bagram Airfield an hour north of Kabul in early July — giving looters time to swipe what they could before Afghan forces took over.

The crucial decision to abandon Bagram Airfield was Biden’s. It features prominently in the second of the two new Afghanistan withdrawal books — Kabul: The Untold Story of Biden’s Fiasco and the American Warriors Who Fought to the End by Jerry Dunleavy and Robert Hassan.

The two authors appeared on C-SPAN today. Their book, they said, shows that military personnel in Afghanistan and Biden’s national security advisers both told Biden in no uncertain terms that Bagram should remain open to facilitate the evacuation. Indeed, the decision should have been a no-brainer given the size of the airbase and the fact that, unlike Kabul airport, it wasn’t located in the middle of Kabul and could be secured.

Biden rejected this advice, apparently because he insisted on drawing down our troop strength to a level to well below the 2,200 needed to secure Bagram. Biden was under no obligation to draw our force down so low before the evacuation. He knew that the Taliban hadn’t honored the accords it reached with the Trump administration.

Yet Biden reduced our force to around 600, far too few to effectuate a safe and complete withdrawal of Americans. He sought simplicity. His team correctly distrusted it.

Both Foer and Dunleavy/Hassan describe other instances in which Biden, similarly ignoring the warnings of his advisers, made decisions that contributed to the disastrous outcome. It was always the same story — Biden’s “swaggering faith in himself” and his desire to display national security chops stood in the way of accepting sound advice from people more intelligent and more knowledgeable than he is.

We shouldn’t have been surprised by this. What is, perhaps, surprising given Biden’s reputation for empathy, is this (from the Post’s article about Foer’s book):

“For a man vaunted for his empathy, he could be detached, even icy, when confronted with the prospect of human suffering,” Foer wrote of Biden, who was caught apparently looking at his watch while attending the dignified transfer of 13 service members killed in an ISIS-K suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport and allegedly told the mother of one of the victims that her son’s death was just like that of his late son Beau. . . .

As for the angry reaction [to the horrors of the withdrawal], Biden considered it “overheated,” reportedly telling an aide that “either the press is losing its mind, or I am.”

It must have been the press. After all, why all the fuss over dead Americans, abandoned Americans, Afghan’s falling to their death from U.S. helicopters they tried to hold onto from outside, and all that?

Maybe Biden is as hollow emotionally as he is intellectually.