Panic images of Afghans fleeing the Taliban 2:33
(CNN) -
Instantly iconic images now cap off the lost war in Afghanistan, telling a painful tale of a national tragedy that ended in a chaotic retreat from the United States under the supervision of President Joe Biden.
On September 14, 2001, President George W. Bush stood on a twisted concrete pyre at Ground Zero in New York and swore through a megaphone: "The people who brought down these buildings will soon hear us."
On Monday, 19 years and 11 months later, desperate Afghans fleeing Taliban reestablishment, a decade after the United States won its revenge against Osama bin Laden in neighboring Pakistan, clung to a US cargo plane departing from the Kabul airport.
Several apparently fell fatally to the ground after takeoff, eerily reminiscent of those who jumped to their deaths from the Twin Towers instead of burning in hell sparked by planes hijacked by the terrorist guests of the Taliban - Al Qaeda - on the 11th. September 2001.
Afghanistan, minute by minute: "I firmly stand by my decision," says Biden
The battles, human tragedies and political mistakes that unfolded between these era-defining moments are culminating in the current defeat and are fueling the treacherous politics of crisis facing another White House 20 years later.
Biden appeared before the world on Monday, under mounting political pressure, to explain his failure to plan for America's longest war exit in the way his constituents and global allies expected: in an orderly, dignified and humane way.
He is accused of having failed to see Afghanistan's impending collapse, of slowly leading the evacuation of Afghans who worked for and trusted the United States, and of overseeing scenes of defeat that tarnish America's power in the eyes of the world.
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Biden's defenders have rightly focused on the poor decisions left to him by former President Donald Trump, who negotiated an earlier US withdrawal with the Taliban that left out the official Washington-backed Afghan government.
And the mistakes of four administrations led to the defeat of the United States to a repressive regime, which will send geopolitical repercussions across the Middle East and around the world.
But Biden is commander-in-chief, and the current chaos looks more like an ignominious defeat than an honorable exit.
"I am the president of the United States. The responsibility ends with me," he said.
Biden: The mission was not to create another nation in Afghanistan 1:11
Yet while he blamed former presidents - implicitly including Barack Obama, whose 2010 troop surge Biden said he disagreed with - for failing to end the conflict and the Afghans themselves for refusing to fight for a devastated land Through generations of war, the president did not really follow Harry Truman's maxim.
Instead, Biden tried to rethink a weekend of chaos and humiliation in Kabul.
He suggested that the choice he faced was between staying for years or decades more, or leaving.
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What happened in the 1990s and future prospects
He admitted that he had underestimated the suddenness of Afghanistan's fall after news programs showed videos of him repeatedly and vehemently dismissing any such possibility.
"The truth is that this unfolded more quickly than we had anticipated," Biden said, but his insistence that he had planned all the possibilities was belied by events.
Presumably those plans never expected the exodus that blocked the Kabul airport runways.
And Biden's emergency deployment of 6,000 troops back to the capital in hurried blocks over the weekend did not provide much evidence of contingency planning.
It is also easy to accuse Afghans of lack of stomach for the fight from the ornate East Room of the White House, thousands of miles from the trauma and fear of a nation on the verge of falling back into repression, and where billions of US dollars were never successful in building a coherent military force.
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People get on a plane at the Kabul airport.
Thousands of people forcibly entered the airport, trying to flee the feared Taliban hard line.
See the most shocking images of the situation in Afghanistan (Credit: WAKIL KOHSAR / AFP via Getty Images) →
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An American soldier points his gun at an Afghan passenger at the Kabul airport after thousands of people forcibly entered the scene trying to flee (Credit: WAKIL KOHSAR / AFP via Getty Images)
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Taliban standing guard in a vehicle on a Kabul street (AFP credit via Getty Images)
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Afghan citizens return to the country after trying to cross the border with Pakistan, after the advance of the Taliban (AFP credit via Getty Images)
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A crowd of Afghan citizens wait at the airport to flee the country (Credit: SHAKIB RAHMANI / AFP via Getty Images)
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Afghan security forces soldiers travel in an armed vehicle in Panjshir province (Credit: AHMAD SAHEL ARMAN / AFP via Getty Images)
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Taliban stand guard in a vehicle on a street in the province of Jalalabad (Credit: AFP via Getty Images)
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Afghan families displaced in the interior of the country due to the advance of the Taliban (Credit: WAKIL KOHSAR / AFP via Getty Images)
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Charyar, 70, looks through a fence from a camp for displaced people in Afghanistan (Credit: Paula Bronstein / Getty Images)
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Displaced citizens wait outside a camp after desperately fleeing their homes in the face of the Taliban advance (Credit: Paula Bronstein / Getty Images)
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Afghans observe damage caused by fighting between Taliban and Afghan security forces in Kunduz, 8 August 2021
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A crowd tries to get on a plane in Kabul
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New satellite images of Maxar showed crowds of people on the runway at Kabul International Airport on Monday (Credit: Satellite image © 2021 Maxar Technologies)
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New satellite images of Maxar showed crowds of people on the runway at Kabul International Airport on Monday (Credit: Satellite image © 2021 Maxar Technologies)
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New satellite images of Maxar showed crowds of people on the runway at Kabul International Airport on Monday (Credit: Satellite image © 2021 Maxar Technologies)
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US soldiers rest after the incidents at the Kabul airport (Credit: WAKIL KOHSAR / AFP via Getty Images)
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Afghan families wait in the baggage area of Kabul airport after thousands of people entered the area to try to flee the country.
(Credit: WAKIL KOHSAR / AFP via Getty Images)
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Afghan passengers wait inside a plane to leave Kabul (Credit: WAKIL KOHSAR / AFP via Getty Images)
Democratic lawmaker laments 'failure' in Afghanistan
Biden's explanations weren't enough for Rep. Seth Moulton, a US Navy veteran who served four terms in Iraq.
The Massachusetts Democrat said history could judge how the war in Afghanistan went wrong.
"But what matters today is the operation that is underway in Afghanistan. That is the failure we are talking about," Moulton said on CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront."
"That is the operation that we have to fix, because there are thousands of innocent lives at stake," Moulton said.
That operation now depends on the will of the Taliban, an enemy of the United States for 20 years, not to interfere.
Biden was alone with one camera in the White House.
Unusually, Vice President Kamala Harris was not by his side, not even the top military commanders or Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
ANALYSIS |
Afghans face a return to the dark age in the midst of the digital age
The choreography could have been intended to show a president looking the American people in the eye.
But he was also quite isolated, after a weekend at the Camp David presidential retreat, marked by a trip to Washington for the speech, and a subsequent return to Maryland to resume his vacation.
The normally empathetic president acknowledged the "heartbreaking" scenes in Kabul, and their effect on veterans and the families of those killed in America's longest war.
But most of his speech seemed like an attempt to quell the political pushback from a weekend of gruesome images.
In fact, Biden spent most of his time discussing a case he had already won with the people: the need to get out of Afghanistan.
Was Joe Biden's decision on Afghanistan correct?
0:53
"How many more lives - American lives - is it worth? How many endless rows of tombstones in Arlington National Cemetery?" Biden asked.
In essence, the president trusts the desire of the American people to leave Afghanistan to hide their mismanagement of the exit. Your instinct could be correct. While Republicans are taking advantage of the debacle to portray Biden as an inept and weak leader, no one is likely to run for president in 2024 promising to send American troops back to foreign battlefields.
More gruesome images, such as the fall of the Afghans from the planes, will increase the political pressure on the president.
Saigon may not have escaped its moment - with helicopters taking off from the US embassy just as they did in the hectic final hours of the Vietnam War.
But if he can avoid a "Black Hawk Down" parallel - the loss of 18 US soldiers on a humanitarian mission in Somalia in 1993 - his current political position could be maintained.
Even in that incident, which exposed a new commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton, to withering criticism and led to the withdrawal of US troops, the political tension finally subsided and Clinton won re-election.
OPINION |
Our Muslim allies must step up to protect women in Afghanistan
In an earlier episode that seemed politically devastating to US power at the time, President Ronald Reagan withdrew US forces from Lebanon, months after a suicide bombing at a US Marine barracks killed 241 members of the military.
Biden will remember both dramas, as he was a senator at the time.
There is also the question whether the general coverage of the Afghanistan pullout, driven in large part by the Washington media, lawmakers, experts and officials who have lived with the war and its political twists for 20 years, is widely shared.
"I fully support my decision," Biden said in a nod to voters outside of Washington who say in polls that they support his decision to end the war.
Afghans Can't Stand Alone Against Taliban, Says 2:24 Analyst
A harmful narrative
A broader political threat to Biden is the possibility that the Afghan calamity could generate a broader narrative of failure surrounding his presidency.
Biden is off to a strong domestic start in his administration, enacting a massive Covid-19 relief package and promoting infrastructure spending in the Senate.
But Republicans, buoyed by Trump's endless selfish remarks, are trying to build an image of a hapless president, weak abroad, besieged by migrant flows rushing to the border and overtaken by the pandemic.
Trump, for example, accused Biden on Monday of "surrendering" to the Taliban and COVID-19.
It was a deeply hypocritical attack given Trump's neglect of the health emergency and his own courtship of the Afghan militia while in office.
But that doesn't mean that a damaging impression of Biden's capabilities doesn't creep in among some voters.
ANALYSIS |
Biden's failed Afghanistan withdrawal is a long-brewing disaster at home and abroad
And the president's own mistakes could undermine his strengths.
He has presented himself as an American problem solver.
He is the American president who defends democracy and has just left a fragile Afghan democracy in ruins.
His claims that the United States has returned are undermined by a public withdrawal.
And if the Taliban once again welcome terrorists targeting the United States, all the political bets the president made on Monday, after noting that the United States had crushed Al Qaeda more than a decade ago, are off.
"If what happens in Afghanistan is a return to a safe haven for the jihadists, the Islamists, then the images we see today will be a noose around the neck for Joe Biden's legacy forever," said Timothy Naftali, presidential historian of the New York University on CNN.
"If the Taliban of today are in any way different from the Taliban of the 1990s ... then perhaps this chaotic end to our 20-year odyssey in Afghanistan will not seem like such a horrible ending."
"Right now, this looks like chaos, and it seems we didn't predict it."
Joe Biden Taliban
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