Monday I wrote about Josh Marshall’s claim that Biden made the right decision to abandon Afghanistan and that the messy ending of that decision doesn’t really matter. In fact, Marshall argued, it might even be better that the collapse happened quickly: [emphasis added]

And it seems to be quicker than the White House figured. But by a month? Three months? Does that matter? I don’t see why. If anything, given the outcome, quicker is better – since a protracted fall is necessarily a bloodier fall. But what the reaction has demonstrated to me is the sheer depth of denial. The inability to accept the reality of the situation. And thus the excuse making. Sen. Maggie Hassan’s press release below is a painfully good example of that. So is this article by in The Atlantic by George Packer. Virtually everything Richard Engel has been writing on Twitter for the last 24 hours. All so much the cant of empire…

That struck me as pretty cold and probably motivated by partisanship. Today Marshall has once again returned to that argument but now he’s specifically defending Biden’s claim that there was no better way to leave. Disaster was baked in therefore Biden shouldn’t be held accountable for disaster.

Certainly the way it’s played out has been messy, chaotic, mortifying. Many armchair quarterbacks have the idea that the US could have evacuated everyone who had worked with us in advance of withdrawal. But as I and many other have argued that’s a basic misunderstanding of the situation. If you evacuate everyone who might be endangered by the fall of the government in advance you are basically signing the regimes death warrant. You are saying you don’t expect the regime to last and that the fall will come fast.

In retrospect of course, knowing that the regime did immediately collapse, sort of no loss. But of course the US couldn’t do that. The whole point of the almost 20 year enterprise was to build a state and an army that could stand on its own. The US was never going to prevent that regime from even trying to survive.

My point here isn’t that there’s nothing the Biden administration could have done differently or better. At a minimum they could have been processing exit paperwork more rapidly in advance for translators and others who worked for the US, having clearer contingency planning for evacuations of personnel outside of Kabul for a rapid collapse scenario. My point is simply that to a great extent what we are seeing today was baked into the US mission in Afghanistan all along. It is ugly. And a lot of people are going to suffer.

I’ll give him this much, at least he’s not pretending, like some Biden defenders, that this isn’t a chaotic mess. He admits it’s a mess but argues that was inevitable. But if the chaos was inevitable then why not act as if that’s the case and simply move quickly to get our people out? His argument is that doing so would have shown we had no confidence in the regime. But we really didn’t have much confidence in the regime. Biden was getting warnings that this could collapse in a matter of weeks or months. It’s not as if he had reason to think, if we played our cards right, this government would last even to the next election much less the end of his term.

The whole thing was about managing failure and once you acknowledge Biden had good reason to think the ship was sinking, even if he underestimated how fast, then the focus becomes how to get people out before they go under. It doesn’t seem to most observers that we did that very well. Having troops stationed at the ready in case things go badly is good but not as good as sending them in to the country in advance, just in case. Why didn’t that happen?

Marshall’s argument seems to boil down to: you can’t fault Biden for being surprised that a government that was predicted to last months only lasted days. Well, why not? Whose job was it to manage the worst case scenario? It’s not accidental that the answer to that question is essentially Joe Biden. It’s very, very hard to imagine a scenario in which a Republican president presides over this scenes of chaos we’re seeing daily and Josh Marshall’s conclusion is, ‘hey, this disaster was baked in so give him a pass.’

The rest of his piece is a lengthy argument about the ways in which the liberals and progressives who make up the media have bought in to “the cant of empire.”

We hear about the very real and dire fate of women and young girls under the Taliban, robbed of futures, banished from public life. And yet when these realities are adduced as the justification for continued or expanded military occupations we must also see that they are both very real and also the latter day cant of empire, much like the way the British East India Company justified its rule of the subcontinent by banning practices like the suttee, the immolation of wives on their husband’s funeral pyres…

What we see in so many reactions, claims of disgrace and betrayal are no more than people who have been deeply bought into these endeavors suddenly forced to confront how much of it was simply an illusion. ‘There had to have been a better way’ is no more than monumental deflection, whatever mistakes or poor planning were involved.

My reaction is simply that if creating a place where girls can go to school, not be married off at 14 and have some control of their own destiny is merely the “cant of empire” then sign me up for the empire. I think Americans are right to feel some pride about those things and therefore also right to feel some shame about abandoning them even after 20 years. I think you can see some of the mixed feelings showing up in the polling, with polls this week showing a lot of people are simultaneously glad we left but also ready to go back in.

The point is, it wasn’t an illusion for the people who were living there under our protection. For a lot of little girls in Afghanistan, a world where girls go to school is the only world they’ve known. What’s collapsing in Afghanistan isn’t an illusion but a reality.

But I guess there’s a big market for all-out defenses of the Biden administration at the moment and Josh Marshall is determined to get those clicks without acknowledging those tough questions are more than just the “cant of empire.”

Update: This leaked British memo underscores the idea that, yes, the withdrawal could have been done better. Our allies certainly seem to think so and in fact seem to have done a better job themselves in many ways under the same circumstances.

In fact, the Washington Examiner is reporting today that a US general told his British counterpart that the British operations outside the airport (rounding up citizens and getting them to safety) were making America look bad by comparison.

So, no, we’re not just dealing with 20 years of accumulated failure or the collapse of an illusion or whatever other tendentious crap Josh Marshall wants to throw out to feed the bruised egos of desperate Biden stans. We’re dealing with a poorly planned and executed withdrawal that could have been handled better in better hands. If you can’t admit that much at this point then the world of illusion you should worry about is your own.