Biden continues to be hammered, but few signs yet of a tottering presidency

When President Joseph Biden took office in January 2021, little would he have realised that his summer was going to be politically hot, and much of the heat was going to be generated by a country tucked away in a region called Central Asia. And if much of the world is fixated on the Taliban’s coming to power and what it means to the people of Afghanistan given the group’s barbaric five-year stint starting 1996, America still continues to be obsessed — and will stay in the course for some more time — in the clumsy and chaotic fashion in which the United States pulled out of that hapless country. Top officials of the administration, starting with Biden, maintained that there were no similarities to the withdrawal from Saigon in 1975, but footages showed that it was much worse.

Since the time the Taliban entered the capital city of Kabul on August 15, Biden has been taking a hit in opinion polls—from a high of about 52 per cent approval rating in June, the president has dropped some eight points, leaving both the White House and Democrats worried. The hammering that Biden is taking is from his own Democratic base and Independents, both of which are crucial to him to stay alive politically in 2022 and beyond. That close to 80 per cent of Republicans have negative view of Biden now is not news; that number has hardly changed since the time the 46^th president took the oath of office.

Along with Biden, his Vice President, Kamala Harris, has also come under the scanner, not for any inputs on Afghanistan, but generally being AWOL — absent without leave — the argument of conservative commentators ranging from ‘hiding’ during an emergency situation to ‘gallivanting’ in Asia at a time of crisis, a reference to Harris’ visits to Singapore and Vietnam. Few in the academic or media community were willing to say that by chance or design the vice president’s presence in the Asia Pacific came precisely at a time when America’s commitment and credibility were being questioned. Singapore is a long-time ally of the United States and Vietnam is country that successive administrations in Washington have been eager to get close to keeping in mind the China factor.

Also read: Can you trust the US as an ally, after Afghanistan?

Some of the frustration of the White House must come from the fact that the media and political pundits pinned that ‘lost’ symbol on Biden, when the two-decade presence of the United States spanned four presidents, two Republicans and two Democrats. It was started by a Republican president, George Bush, and ended with a Democratic Biden. In between more than two trillion dollars went down the drain and a loss of close to 2,500 American service personnel. Opinion surveys even now show that the blame for the Afghan mess is laid out in this sequence: Bush, Biden, Obama and Trump.

A small comfort to Biden is that a poll by Washington Post/ ABC News shows that 77 per cent of the American people are with the president on the pullout; the downslide in numbers begin only about the crazy withdrawal process that showed Afghans precariously hanging on to planes at take off only to come crashing to their deaths or being crushed by the wheels of the giant cargo transporters; and finally, the twin blasts at Kabul in the final stages that killed 13 American service personnel. Biden was supposed to know foreign affairs as he was in the Senate panel and also as its chair; but was somehow naïve and blindly believed what was handed to him by former Afghan officials, including its President, Ashraf Ghani.

In the closing stages, Biden in his last telephone call with Ghani on July 23 — a transcript of which was sourced by Reuters — tried to impress on his Afghan counterpart the need to present a different perception of the goings on; and that massive American air strike could be a possibility if Washington was shown a game plan. But where Biden miscalculated, and this could be fobbed off on a massive intelligence failure, is in the assessment of the fighting mettle of Afghan forces. The exaggerated strength of 300,000 aside, the characterisation by Biden of this army being the “finest” turned out to be the cruelest joke. The Taliban rolled into Kabul with great ease and the first to flee the scene was Ghani and Company, first to Tajikistan and later to the United Arab Emirates ostensibly to prevent further bloodshed.

Also read: Biden’s legislative agenda is incomplete at August recess

A large part of Biden’s falling popularity is Afghanistan, but not solely confined to this subject as Conservatives would want to project. Some of it also has to do with the over-confidence of the administration on the coronavirus front that has resulted in a jolt by way of rising infection rate and deaths as a result of the Delta variant; and linked to this is the bleak jobs report provided by the Department of Labor for August after two rounds of robust showings. But the political trappings of who lost what and to whom has been a game that has been played since the 1950s with Korea; and presidents, especially during the heydays of the Cold War, have been careful not to go down in history as the person who lost a country to the ‘communists’.

The Biden presidency is not tottering and the last words have not been said about the 2022 mid-term elections, which is more than a year away; or the 2024 presidential poll, which is three years down the line. It is too early to speculate on who is a liability on whom — Biden on Harris or the other way around; or for that matter start writing the political obituary of the United States — as some already have — in global affairs.

(A former senior journalist in Washington covering North America and United Nations, the writer is currently a Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication in  the College of Science and Humanities at SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai)

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