Opinion | Chris Murphy gets it right on how to examine Afghanistan - The Washington Post - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...phy-afghanistan-hearings-biden
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Democrats have mostly focused on the process and decisions adopted by the Biden administration leading up to wrenching scenes of stranded refugees, including countless people who aided the U.S.
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This framing has been widely echoed by neutral journalists, but embedded in it is a very pronounced point of view. It treats it as an established, objective fact that there existed an alternate execution of the withdrawal that would have been quasi-immaculate in nature.
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That framing also implicitly takes a position — in the negative — on whether a very messy withdrawal was an inevitable outgrowth of the situation that was created by 20 years of misguided policy.
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It also privileges the position of Republicans, who want the focus narrow for obvious political reasons, since a broader focus would implicate their party. And it privileges the position of those who advocated for this war all along.
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“Right now many Democrats are buying into Republican arguments that the Biden administration is solely to blame for the chaos,” Murphy said. “That is not true. We’re seeing the regrettable but inevitable consequence of a 20-year war that was badly mismanaged and lasted far too long.”
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“There is this fantasy that has been constructed by the media and members of both parties that we could leave Afghanistan, amid a collapse of the Afghan army and government, in a neat, clean way,”
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Congressional investigations are appropriate, because we need to know the full story and what governing weaknesses it reveals. Perhaps such investigations will reveal that an alternate approach would have been much cleaner.
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But no one should be asserting this as an objective fact at this point. And regardless, it in no way requires the focus to be only on those things.
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it’s plainly in the public interest to determine the full scope of folly that went into the entire sorry episode.
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Indeed, the claim that a broader focus is “partisan” is itself a deeply biased claim: It validates and protects the position of Republicans and the war’s initiators and longtime boosters. A broader focus would implicate Democratic supporters of the war, too.
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Why do few Democrats go here? Matt Duss, a foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who backs Biden’s decision, points to a party-wide problem: Democratic presidents often face blowback from their own party when they buck hawkish D.C. conventional wisdom.
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“Whether it’s Barack Obama negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran or Biden drawing down in Afghanistan,” Duss told me, “it’s crazy that Democratic presidents face more aggressive criticism from their own party for trying to end wars or prevent them through diplomacy than they do when continuing decades-old wars or launching new ones.”