The Daily Fuckup

On Aug. 27, 2021, the fight over Afghanistan was as much about blame as it was about events on the ground. Donald Trump and his allies were pressing the case that Joe Biden owned the chaos in Kabul. Biden, for his part, was pointing back to the agreement Trump signed with the Taliban in February 2020, which set a withdrawal deadline and set the terms for a U.S. exit.

The basic chronology mattered. The Trump administration negotiated the U.S.-Taliban agreement on Feb. 29, 2020. In April 2021, Biden announced that U.S. troops would leave Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 2021, later shifting the target to Aug. 31. By the time the Taliban took Kabul in mid-August and the evacuation at the airport turned desperate, both administrations were already part of the argument over how the war ended.

That left Trump in a familiar political position: attacking the fallout while defending the deal that helped shape it. His team argued that Biden had handled the withdrawal badly and could have planned it better. Biden’s side argued that the deal Trump struck narrowed the options available to the next president and helped create the conditions for a rushed departure. Those are competing political claims, but the underlying documents are not in dispute.

The result was an Afghanistan story that refused to stay inside one presidency. Trump could blame Biden for the scenes in Kabul, and Biden could blame Trump for the agreement that preceded them. What the record shows is simpler than the rhetoric: the final collapse came under Biden, but the road to it had already been laid, in part, under Trump.