The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan left a stain on President Joe Biden’s reputation from which he never fully recovered. Three years after those chaotic scenes unfolded in the Middle East, could they come back to haunt Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential bid?
Since becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris has sought to position herself as central to the achievements of the Biden administration but separate from its failures. For the most part, she has pulled it off. Or, as she put it, she has been “unburdened by what has been.”
A survey by Democratic polling firm Blueprint 2024 days after Biden exited the race found that Harris had a unique opportunity to define herself more favorably than Biden. Most voters did not credit Harris with Biden’s signature accomplishments, nor did they blame her for the shortcomings. Nearly seven in 10 voters said Harris was not responsible for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.
Republicans are hoping to change that. Former President Donald Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, has sought to tie his Democratic opponent to the Afghanistan withdrawal, repeatedly pointing out that Harris said she was the last person in the room when Biden decided to pull troops out by August 31, 2021. She has also described the move as “courageous.”
“She had the final vote,” Trump said at a rally in North Carolina last week. “She had the final say, and she was all for it.”
He sought to pin blame on her again Monday while speaking to the National Guard Association of the United States in Detroit, going even further to claim that the withdrawal is what led to other international conflicts that began after the drawdown.
“Caused by Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around,” Trump said. “It gave us Russia going into Ukraine. It gave us the October 7 attack on Israel, because it gave us lack of respect.”
On the anniversary of the August 26 suicide bombing, a video of Harris telling CNN anchor Dana Bash that she was the last person in the room and that she felt “comfortable” with the situation went viral. The clip was shared by GOP top dogs from House Speaker Mike Johnson to Trump adviser Jason Miller.
“The Biden-Harris administration inherited a mess from Donald Trump,” Harris’ campaign said in a Monday statement. “Trump wants America to forget that he had four years to get out of Afghanistan, but failed to do it.”
Chaos in Afghanistan: Final Days Before Drawdown
On August 30, 2021, after evacuating more than 120,000 people from Afghanistan, the U.S. military completed its exit from America’s longest war.
The decision to withdraw in 2021 is widely seen as a direct result of the timeline that the Trump administration developed, but Biden’s call was the culmination of years of skepticism over the U.S. military’s ability to weaken the Taliban and strengthen the Afghan government.
As vice president, Biden was among the first in the Obama administration to cast doubt about strategic goals in the Middle East. On the campaign trail, Biden vowed to end wars in Afghanistan in the Middle East, conflicts that he said in 2020 “have cost us untold blood and treasure.” By the time Biden became president in January 2021, two-thirds of Americans agreed.
No one expected the operation to be seamless, but the abrupt and chaotic exit that followed was far worse than anyone imagined.
U.S. intelligence officials said the Taliban could take over the capital within six to 12 months after the withdrawal. The swift fall of Kabul happened in just hours—two weeks before the U.S. finished its drawdown. Immediately, thousands of people began rushing to Hamid Karzai International Airport in hopes of escaping Taliban rule. Photos showed desperate scenes of people clinging to the wings of planes that were taking off.
“Even three years later, it’s important to recognize that no agency or department in the U.S. government anticipated the sudden collapse of the Afghan armed forces,” former Ambassador to Afghanistan Michael McKinley told Newsweek, adding that after Kabul fell, “What may have been a reasonable timetable for departure in April or May very quickly turned into something else, and adapting to the changing circumstances on the ground was a very difficult enterprise.”
Four days before the last U.S. military planes left Afghanistan, a suicide bombing at the airport in Kabul killed nearly 200 people, including 13 U.S. servicemembers.
“Those few hours leading up to the actual attack at Abbey Gate were very, very tense. I mean, you could cut the air,” Travis Akers, a former senior intelligence officer for Operation Allies Refuge, told Newsweek. Operation Allies Refuge was the name of the evacuation effort in the final weeks of the Afghanistan withdrawal.
After finding out the attack killed 13 of his comrades, Akers’ shock “quickly became anger.” He also became angry with leadership, both in the Pentagon and in Washington, over poor planning.
Americans watching events in Kabul unfold on TV were also upset and Biden’s approval ratings sank, never fully recovering. He would eventually be forced out of his reelection bid by his own party.
“The violent images of those final days in Kabul will haunt our commander-in-chief much as the U.S. withdrawal in defeat from Vietnam and the failed attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages in 1975 and 1980 scarred presidents Ford and Carter and led to their defeats at the ballot box,” presidential historian Barbara Perry said.
Biden Takes the Fall
The Afghanistan withdrawal kicked off an avalanche of bad news that would ultimately end Biden’s decades-long political career.
Eight months into his presidency, his approval ratings tanked. In September 2021—for the first time in his presidency—the majority of Americans, 53 percent, disapproved of Biden’s performance, according to a Gallup poll. His score would remain underwater for the next three years.
Kevin Wagner, the director of Florida Atlantic University’s Political Communications and Public Opinion lab, told Newsweek: “What Afghanistan and the circumstances around the withdrawal from Afghanistan suggested was that the president didn’t have full command of what was happening, that the president didn’t anticipate correctly.
“When you start questioning competence, other issues related to competence, including things associated with his age and other decisions that he may or may not have made, start to pile on.”
In the three years that followed, Biden contended with skyrocketing inflation, immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border and international conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. A disastrous TV debate against Trump would ultimately sound the death knell for the 81-year-old.
John Geer, the dean of the college of arts and sciences at Vanderbilt University, noted that since the war began, every U.S. president has struggled with the Afghanistan problem.
“Trump didn’t exactly handle it with great skill. Obama didn’t either. This has been an albatross around the necks of all the presidents,” Geer told Newsweek. “[Biden’s] not going to get any credit it, that’s for sure.”
Is Biden’s Afghanistan Lesson Harris’ to Learn?
Trump and the GOP insist that Harris was a major player in the withdrawal, as she has said, but it remains to be seen whether the associated criticism will affect the November election.
McKinley believes the withdrawal could be a theme in the election but might be overshadowed by more successful engagements that the administration had in a number of conflicts elsewhere.
“The last three years has been a rehabilitation of the image of the U.S. internationally,” he said, pointing to the alliances strengthened in the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East and with NATO.
Former Obama Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in a statement shared with Newsweek that Harris’ role in the withdrawal could even help her in the election. He said that her being a part of national security meetings related to Afghanistan would have allowed her to absorb the same information Biden received and would help her understand the logic behind Biden’s decision. Still, he said she could embark on her own foreign policy path.
“You do not decide what the crisis is going to be,” Panetta said. “Crisis is trying to decide whether what you are going to do in terms of dealing with that particular crisis. So I don’t think I expect her to kind of just be a double for Biden.
“I do believe it’s important that the fundamentals be pretty much pursuant to what Biden has put in place. But I think as issues come up, whether it’s in the Middle East or elsewhere, she’s pretty much going to be her own person and that’s OK.”
Alex Patton, a GOP strategist, told Newsweek that Republicans could have success tying Harris to Afghanistan as she still refers to the drawdown as “our administration’s withdrawal,” but said that “it isn’t as potent a line of attack that the GOP thinks it is.”
“The Biden-Harris administration was carrying out former President Trump’s withdrawal,” he said.
Patton said the key issue for Harris, as with Biden, is competence. In Biden’s case, those questions were tied to his age. For Harris, Patton suggested, her gender could be weaponized against her.
“If the GOP is successful in creating doubt about the vice president’s ability to be commander-in-chief, it could have some effect,” he said.
While Trump has spent much of his campaign attacking the current administration’s record over the last four years, the Harris campaign has tried to steer the conversation toward forward.
“The future is always worth fighting for,” Harris said at the Democratic National Convention on August 22. “And that’s the fight we are in right now—a fight for America’s future.”
