America’s Afghan war is over but the battle for Biden’s legacy is only just beginning

The coming Washington showdown over the war

Biden’s Afghan miscalculations, which left US troops relying on their 20-year enemies in the Taliban to secure the evacuation and effectively led to the deaths of 13 US troops in a suicide bombing last week, allowed Republicans to build a narrative of haplessness and neglect they will drive into the midterm elections next year.

The GOP charge that Biden left Americans behind could be an incendiary one, given that their chances to leave freely and safely seem remote under the Taliban. And the risks inherent in Biden’s promised “over the horizon” anti-terror strategy were highlighted by the deaths of a young Afghan family this weekend in a US strike on what the American military insisted was a vehicle bomb destined for Kabul airport.

Yet the last few weeks also showcased the hypocrisy of the Republican Party, which ignored its complicity in ex-President Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban, a folding that set the stage for the current debacle. The usual torrent of misinformation pumped out by conservative media — as US troops were stationed on a dangerous foreign battlefield — showed that the threat to truth posed by the previous presidency is far from passed, and is the latest sign that Biden’s pleas for national unity will go unfulfilled.

GOP lawmakers who excused and enabled the former President’s historic assault on democracy demanded Biden’s impeachment or resignation. And Trump’s own staggering incoherence over the war he boasted about forcing Biden to end shone through in a statement Monday in which he appeared to suggest the US should reinvade to recapture hardware already destroyed by the military.