The Daily Fuckup

On Sept. 1, 2021, the political fallout from Afghanistan was still coursing through Washington, and Donald Trump was impossible to remove from the center of it. The dominant public outrage was aimed at President Joe Biden, whose handling of the withdrawal had produced a staggering airport crisis, anguished scenes of evacuation, and a sense that the United States was watching a war end in disorder rather than closure. Yet the deeper argument in Washington was not simply about the execution of the pullout. It was about the framework that made the exit possible in the first place: the February 2020 agreement Trump’s administration reached with the Taliban in Doha. That deal did more than outline a path to withdrawal. It set expectations, created a timetable, and told allies, Afghan officials and the Taliban itself that the United States had already chosen its end date. By the time Kabul fell and the evacuation became an international emergency, the dispute had become less about one administration’s mistakes than about whether the disaster had been embedded in the original bargain.

The political problem for Trump was straightforward and severe. His deal gave the Taliban a major strategic advantage while asking for relatively little up front, at least in the eyes of critics who viewed the arrangement as a one-sided concession. The Taliban could present itself as the side willing to wait out the Americans, while the United States had effectively committed itself to leaving. That mattered because the agreement was not just a diplomatic gesture; it was a signal with real consequences. It told Afghan partners that American leverage was shrinking and it told adversaries that the U.S. presence was on borrowed time. Once that message had been delivered, any future president would face a far narrower set of options. Reversing course would have required either a renewed escalation or a politically costly admission that the United States was backing away from its own deal. Critics of Biden can fairly argue that the final evacuation was badly managed and that the collapse at the airport was avoidable in its worst forms. But that criticism does not erase the fact that the Doha framework had already put the next administration on a dangerous track. The Taliban had every reason to believe the prize was ultimately theirs: the departure of American forces and the unraveling of the mission that had anchored U.S. involvement for two decades.

What made the episode especially damaging was the gap between the promise of the deal and the reality that followed. Trump’s team treated negotiations with the Taliban as though they were part of a conventional peace process, a controlled diplomatic handoff that could preserve leverage, reduce violence and produce an orderly exit. In theory, the arrangement would lower the risk of chaos by clarifying the terms of withdrawal and encouraging all sides to prepare for a transition. In practice, it appears to have had the opposite effect. It reinforced the Taliban’s patience, encouraged the sense that the Americans were leaving no matter what, and undermined Afghan confidence in the durability of the U.S. commitment. Afghan institutions had reason to worry that Washington’s clock was running out even if the battlefield situation remained unstable. By the summer of 2021, those worries had become reality. The Taliban advanced rapidly, Kabul collapsed with stunning speed, and the airport evacuation turned into a symbol of panic that echoed around the world. Trump supporters continued to argue that Biden owned the final disaster because he was the president in office when everything broke. That argument had political force, especially in a country exhausted by war and hungry for accountability. But it was also incomplete. The Doha agreement had already narrowed the range of outcomes, and once the Taliban understood that the United States was committed to leaving, the leverage imbalance only grew more pronounced.

None of that means Biden was blameless, or that Trump alone caused the Afghan collapse. The withdrawal was the product of a chain of decisions, stretching across multiple administrations and institutions, and the final disaster reflected failures in planning, intelligence, diplomacy and judgment that did not begin or end with one president. Still, the political conversation on Sept. 1 had moved beyond the simplest partisan reflexes. The question was no longer merely whether Biden had mishandled the evacuation, although many Americans plainly believed he had. It was whether Trump’s Doha deal had made a catastrophic outcome more likely by locking the United States into a framework the Taliban could exploit and Afghan partners could not trust. That is a more serious charge than a routine blame contest. It suggests the collapse was not just a procedural failure at the end of a war, but a strategic failure built into the terms of the exit itself. Trump left office before the consequences arrived in full, but the consequences were tied to his choices all the same. In that sense, the Afghanistan withdrawal had become a bipartisan failure with a very specific origin story: a bargain meant to end a war that instead helped set the stage for a collapse in confidence, a collapse in credibility and a collapse in control.