Biden and Afghanistan: is the media storm already over?

Joe Biden continues to be his own worst enemy.

At a news conference last week, Biden took questions from the White House press corps. He handled it well but perhaps too well. Feeling buoyed by his performance, he reached the end of the session and quipped, as if an afterthought: “Let me take the one question from the most interesting guy I know in the press…”

That guy was long-time antagonist Peter Doocy.

American journalism is notable for being perhaps even more nepotistic than it is in Britain, so it should be no surprise that Doocy is the son of Fox and Friend’s host, Steve Doocy. When Fox News swung behind Trumpism, Steve became a vocal advocate for the former president who had a habit of phoning into the show. Peter, meanwhile, took up residency in the White House Press Room where he made a name for himself by asking questions coloured by his channel’s preoccupations.

Picking Doocy was an aggressive move by Biden and quite unnecessary given that Trump had rarely given the other side any opportunity to cross-examine him. Yet here was Biden, naïvely exposing himself to a question framed in a way that would force the President to “take the blame” for everything that had happened.

“There had not been a US service member killed in combat in Afghanistan since February of 2020,” said Doocy. “You set a deadline. You pulled troops out. You sent troops back in. And now 12 marines are dead. You said the buck stops with you. Do you bear any responsibility for the way things have unfolded in the last two weeks?”

It was a clever question because there was no other way for the President to answer that other than the way he did.

“I bear responsibility fundamentally for all that’s happened,” said Biden, giving any hostile press the only soundbite they would need. They would cut it there, long before Biden explained how the former president made “a deal with the Taliban”. Yet if the President had made a poor fist of lousy hand, the next move was pure blunder. He made the mistake of turning the question around.

“Do you think that’s accurate, to the best of your knowledge?” he asked Doocy.

You could see Biden’s game plan. He wanted to present facts as dispassionately as possible, establish some common ground from which he would explain the difficulties of withdrawal. Yet by handing the initiative to Doocy, Biden was left standing at the podium as the reporter threw back more loaded questions.

That’s when the President should have stood tall and rode out the questions. He should not have sighed, leaned forward onto his folder, lips touching his hands. With his eyes closed, he resembled a penitent man at prayer. Cameras snapped and the picture featured prominently in the week’s coverage. It showed a President bowed by pressure, who appeared to be struggling with the weight of his office. The Daily Mail uploaded the clip to its YouTube channel with the title: “Biden adopts fetal position as he crumbles under reporter questioning about Kabul blast“.

There are two inaccuracies in that reporting. First, it wasn’t a “fetal position”. Second, he didn’t crumble under questioning. Anybody who has watched Biden for long enough knows the President was restraining his considerable temper, foolishly revealing his frustration with a situation being poisoned by partisan bickering.

Whilst it would be easy to characterise this as the fault of Doocy and, by extension, Fox News, the blame rests with the President, who habitually allows his enemies to get under his skin. This wasn’t the first or last time Biden would prove to be naïve in front of the cameras (indeed, it’s becoming a feature of his presidency). Later in the week, meeting Israel’s new Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, he bowed his head as Bennett spoke. With his eyes closed, Biden looked like he was asleep, which is precisely how it was spun by the right-wing press, who failed to report his articulate response to Bennett’s statement. For a man too often and cruelly described by his opponents as given to mid-afternoon naps, Biden doesn’t do enough to prove them wrong.

The two examples are worth highlighting to make the simple point about carefully edited material. On the right, the Trumpian channels select evidence that portrayed the Afghan withdrawal in absolute terms. Laura Ingrams told her viewers that “the deadly, idiotic handling of our Afghanistan withdrawal will be a permanent stain on America’s foreign policy and our military leadership”, whilst Sean Hannity calling it “the worst self-inflicted foreign policy crisis in modern American history. One of the worst in history.”

If Fox News set the bar for success too high, over on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow set it too low. She described the Afghan withdrawal within the context of historical retreats by the British and Russians, compared to which the US withdrawal can be considered as a success. “Over the past 17 days,” she reported, “the US airlift brought more than 122,000 people out of Afghanistan through that single runway airfield. The single largest non-combatant evacuation in the history of the US military by a lot.”

Between these two positions lies the coverage from the less partisan outlets which more properly recognised the nuances of the situation on the ground. The degree to which CNN has criticised the President has felt like a deliberate strategy to prove they were never “pro-Biden”, but the reality is that there’s been a great resetting of the media post-Trump. Biden is being judged by the standards of all presidents, which is either to his credit or the credit of Trump who could always reshape the narrative by providing something more outrageous to talk about.

In those terms, the coverage has been refreshingly diverse, with plenty of hard questions asked of this administration. Whilst it’s easy to dismiss the histrionics emanating from Fox News, the same can’t be said about the barbs aimed by conservative commentators such as Noah Rothman, writing for Commentary, who claimed: “The Biden administration chose to sacrifice [America’s] hard-won advantage – no one else.” David Frum too, writing for The Atlantic, shifted the blame to Democrats. “It became Democratic Party doctrine to demand more and more for Afghanistan,” he argued. Tom Nichol, also in The Atlantic, put it more pragmatically and, perhaps, correctly: “After the worst attack on US soil, Americans had no real interest in adult conversation about the reality of anti-terrorist operations in so harsh an environment as Afghanistan … nor did they want to think about whether “draining the swamp” and modernizing and developing Afghanistan … was worth the cost and effort.”

Beyond the usual partisan madness, the enigma of Afghanistan remains the one constant. From a political perspective, Biden might yet emerge from this debacle with some credibility in the eyes of the American public who still largely agree with him. They would have certainly agreed with the sentiments that Biden expressed on Tuesday night. In his most effective and personal speech, he talked about the “18 veterans, on average, who die by suicide every single day in America — not in a far-off place, but right here in America.”

This time he did stand tall and look straight at the American people. “There’s nothing low-grade or low-risk or low-cost about any war. It’s time to end the war in Afghanistan.” 

And end it he has. The story is sure to rumble on, but American politics is migratory. It might roost on a spot for a time but once it does move on then it does so en masse. No sooner had the last American troops flown out of Kabul than The Daily Beast and The New Republic were leading with the looming fight around abortion rights in Texas. That story is already climbing the front pages of The Washington Post and New York Times. It will sit beneath the mastheads of most nationals within days, making the point that abortion, not Afghanistan, is already the story most likely to help decide the coming mid-terms.