Who Takes the Blame?
Updated at 2:10 p.m. ET on August 27, 2021.
Who, exactly, is responsible for today’s calamity in Afghanistan? ISIS appears to be the author of this tragedy, but are American officials at fault as well? At least 12 U.S. service members and dozens of Afghan civilians are dead after an attack by a suicide bomber just outside the Kabul airport. The number of casualties is sure to rise.
For that matter, who will Americans blame when they think about the image of desperate Afghans clinging to a departing C-17? Even before the bombings in Kabul, the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan had been intermittently chaotic—some of those lucky enough to escape were transferred to rat- and feces-infested holding facilities in Qatar. A lost war is ending much as it began 20 years ago, with a gruesome terrorist attack targeting Americans.
Prior to today’s attack, Congress had already opened hearings into the Biden administration’s handling of the Afghanistan pullout, though Washington has its own ideas of who was culpable. A recent story distilled the”—a reference to the foreign-policy establishment’s current view of Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas, a Republican and ex–Navy SEAL who lost his right eye in an explosion while serving in Afghanistan, singled out Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this week. At a private briefing with lawmakers, Blinken said the U.S. expected to extract all Americans from Afghanistan by President Joe Biden’s August 31 deadline, Crenshaw told me. “I don’t like the way the secretary of state toed the line for Biden,” he said. “No sane person believes that.”
