“America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan,” The Atlantic informs its readers, “added moral injury to military failure.” George Packer not only alludes to the greatest disgrace — abandoning Americans to the Taliban by the thousands — but takes aim at Joe Biden for abandoning our allies in Afghanistan in his hasty, ill-considered, and politically manipulative retreat. Originally titled “Joe Biden’s Saigon,” its new headline is nearly as damning — “Zero Responsibility”:

Many of the advocates were in favor of ending the war. With the sand now running out, they made their case for early evacuations on moral and strategic grounds. If, on the way out of Afghanistan, America broke its promises to people at great risk of revenge killings, its already battered international reputation would be further damaged. Such a failure would also injure the morale of American troops, who were now staring at a lost war, and whose code of honor depended on leaving no one behind.

The advocates omitted one person from their calculations: the president. But Biden’s history in this area should have troubled them.

On April 14, 1975, as North Vietnamese divisions raced toward Saigon, the 32-year-old first-term senator from Delaware was summoned to the White House. President Gerald Ford pleaded with him and other senators for funding to evacuate Vietnamese allies. Biden refused. “I feel put-upon,” he said. He would vote for money to bring out the remaining Americans, but not one dollar for the locals. On April 23, as South Vietnam’s collapse accelerated, Biden repeated the point on the Senate floor. “I do not believe the United States has an obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals” other than diplomats, he said. That was the job of private organizations. “The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese.”

And Packer recalls the lessons that Biden took from that disgrace, which is that everyone got away with it. His headline is a quote from Biden via Richard Holbrook:

In late 2010, Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, came into Vice President Biden’s office to talk about the situation of Afghan women. According to an audio diary Holbrooke kept, Biden insisted, “I am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights.” (Biden’s son Beau, a member of the Delaware National Guard, had recently been deployed to Iraq for a year.) He wanted every American troop out of Afghanistan, regardless of the consequences for women or anyone else. When Holbrooke asked about the obligation to people who had trusted the U.S. government, Biden said, “Fuck that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam; Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.” During the 2020 campaign, an interviewer repeated some of these quotes to Biden and asked if he believed he would bear responsibility for harm to Afghan women after a troop withdrawal and the return of the Taliban. Biden bristled and his eyes narrowed. “No, I don’t!” he snapped, and put his thumb and index finger together. “Zero responsibility.”

Apparently, Biden didn’t learn much from the fall of Saigon except how to avoid responsibility for a collapse. Others, however, foresaw the problem and the obvious logistical point of failure, especially after the US evacuated and shut down Bagram without coordinating the effort with the Afghan government. Even Obama administration strategists had recognized the potential for a catastrophic collapse under those circumstances.

Packer at first discusses this in terms of political optics. A mass and chaotic withdrawal would create the impression that “America has lost another war,” which certainly turned out to be true. However, the real disgrace wasn’t the loss, but the manner in which we abandoned everyone to get out, including Americans:

But while waiting for Kabul to fall, the administration could have timed the military withdrawal to support evacuations, rather than pulling out all the hard assets while leaving all the soft targets behind. It could have created an interagency task force, vested with presidential authority and led by an evacuations czar—the only way to force different agencies to coordinate resources in order to solve a problem that is limited in scope but highly complex. It could have assembled comprehensive lists of thousands of names, locations, email addresses, and phone numbers—not just for interpreters like Khan, but for others at risk, including women like Hawa. It could have begun to quietly organize flights on commercial aircraft in the spring—moving 1,000 people a week—and gradually increased the numbers. It could have used the prospect of lifting sanctions and giving international recognition to a future Taliban government as leverage, demanding secure airfields and safe passage for Afghans whom the Americans wanted to bring out with them. It could have used airfields in Herāt, Mazar-i-Sharif, Jalalabad, and Kandahar while those cities remained out of Taliban control. It could have drawn up emergency plans for Afghan evacuations and rehearsed them in interagency drills. It could have included NATO allies in the planning. It could have shown imagination and initiative. But the administration did none of this. …

“What they thought they were going to do was pull all the U.S. assets out, and the Afghan government would hold on long enough so that, when it collapsed, there would be no photographs of the evacuation,” Mike Breen, of Human Rights First, told me. “There wouldn’t be a Saigon moment, because there wouldn’t be any Americans around and any American helicopters to hang off. They thought the Afghan military was going to die in place to buy them time.” This scenario recalled the “decent interval” that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had sought between the end of the American war in Vietnam and the demise of the South Vietnamese government, to avoid the optics of an American defeat. As Biden had put it to Richard Holbrooke, this was how Nixon and Kissinger tried to get away with it.

Not only did that not work, they never bothered to plan for getting Americans out. Packer skirts that issue in this massive condemnation, but it certainly shines through in this paragraph. They didn’t do any better with interpreters either, or other Afghans who had supported the US military and NGOs who would shortly become targets for Taliban reprisals. In July and August, at the prodding of the same political allies who had pressed Biden to get out of Afghanistan, the administration announced efforts to get SIVs out, but it didn’t take long for those allies to conclude it was a CYA effort and nothing more:

On July 14, Reichel informed McCoy and others that the president was about to announce a new initiative, called Operation Allies Refuge. The U.S. government would soon begin bringing SIV holders on flights to America. Reichel called them “relocation flights for interested and eligible Afghans.” The phrasing was curious; it avoided the word evacuation, and it suggested that some visa holders didn’t want to leave Afghanistan. On July 8, Biden had claimed that “fewer than half” of SIV holders had chosen to leave. This became a persistent talking point, and a false one: Almost all of the remaining Afghans with visas were in official limbo, waiting for the United Nations to put them on flights to the U.S., or for family members to receive passports and visas. The president, echoed by his officials, was trying to blame the Afghans for their own entrapment.

Still, with a presidential speech, a named operation, and planned flights, the administration finally appeared to be taking action. “It seemed like they were belatedly meeting the concerns we were raising,” McCoy later told me. But nothing happened until July 30, when one charter flight brought 221 SIV holders and family members to Fort Lee, outside Richmond, Virginia. These were Afghans whose visas had already been approved; the U.S. government was simply accelerating their arrival. McCoy began to think that Operation Allies Refuge was a “performative stunt,” intended to convince ordinary voters in, say, Michigan and Pennsylvania who might have seen something on TV about endangered Afghans that the administration had it covered.

And the blame-shifting wasn’t limited to just the abandoned Afghans. Joe Biden and Antony Blinken have repeatedly stuck to that formula of those who have expressed a desire to leave. State has also insisted on using “citizens” as a metric rather than including the much larger number of legal permanent residents. The campaign to mislead on Biden’s performance on the Afghanistan withdrawal began well before the collapse and continues to this day.

Packer does a very credible job of exposing all of the lies from Biden and his team, except those relating to Americans left behind Taliban lines. “Zero responsibility” is well worth reading nevertheless, although those who have bothered to keep up with this disgraceful episode will not find themselves surprised by the details revealed by Packer. This lengthy and deeply reported saga also indirectly points up the shameful absence of the national media on all of these issues.

In case you missed it earlier, be sure to watch John Ondrasik‘s new podcast series, “Meet the Heroes.” Packer does an excellent job in highlighting efforts by Americans to mitigate Biden’s disgrace with private exfil operations, and John plans on focusing on the people stepping up to that job.