The Daily Fuckup

By early August 2021, the fight over Afghanistan had already turned into a contest over responsibility. Donald Trump and his allies were pressing the case that President Joe Biden owned the collapse, while Biden’s defenders kept pointing back to the deal Trump’s team struck with the Taliban the year before. The dispute was not hard to trace. Trump’s administration signed the Doha agreement on Feb. 29, 2020, and the document set a May 1, 2021 withdrawal target that the next administration inherited. citeturn0search0turn0search2

That backdrop mattered because the Biden administration was already dealing with a deteriorating battlefield in the summer of 2021. In July, Biden said the United States had accomplished its core mission in Afghanistan and argued that the remaining choice was not between a good outcome and a bad one, but between ending the war and staying in it. He also defended the drawdown as the United States pulled out troops and abandoned Bagram Air Base. citeturn0search0turn0search1

By mid-August, the Taliban’s gains had become impossible to spin away. Kabul fell on Aug. 15, the evacuation started the same day, and the administration moved into emergency rescue mode. That sequence did not erase Biden’s responsibility for what happened on his watch, but it also did not leave Trump with a clean escape hatch. The prior administration had negotiated the exit framework, committed the United States to leaving, and helped narrow the set of options available to the White House that followed. citeturn0search1turn0search3

That is the problem with Trump’s Afghanistan attack: it worked as a political gesture, but it ran straight into the record. Republicans could and did argue about the speed of the withdrawal, the handling of the evacuation, and the optics of Kabul’s fall. What they could not credibly do was pretend the endgame began in 2021. The Doha deal, the deadline, and the troop pullback timeline were already part of the story before Biden took office. citeturn0search2turn0search3