"The idea that Biden 'botched' the 'execution' of this withdrawal became media and GOP conventional wisdom in advance of any critical thinking, and I still haven’t heard a single representative of either entity credibly answer the question, Compared to what? There are no shortage of nonsense answers, and there are those who articulate alternative scenarios that amount to surging in more troops, re-igniting the war. But accounting for everything that was and wasn’t under our control, all plausible withdrawal scenarios converge on some kind of morass.
"Even in a blackbox scenario where we stipulate that the U.S. could have safely evacuated everyone we intended to evacuate before the Taliban reached Kabul—where, say, Afghan forces fended off the Taliban for weeks instead of days, as Biden apparently believed they would—the scenes of desperation and brutality that Biden’s critics have referenced as proof of his failure wouldn’t have been avoided. They would have just taken place off camera.
"The worst of those scenes played out on Monday, and a narrative congealed around them right away—in part because the national press has been on high alert for any storylines that lend themselves to 'tough on both sides' posturing..." -- Brian Beutler, in Big Tent's "Withdrawing Conclusions." The media reeks with the desperate posturing Beutler mentions, looking for angles to knock President Biden down a few notches, and not particularly concerned with historical perspective. In his interview, ABC's George "Steponaflagpinopoulos" covered the same ground over and over, and seemed skeptical that Biden couldn't see an outcome "without chaos ensuing." Well, we couldn't see an outcome without the media botching the story through what Margaret Sullivan calls "nuance- deprived, overstated coverage."
