I find myself increasingly annoyed at much of the press coverage of the end of the US war in Afghanistan.  Yes, the Biden administration did obviously screw up in not planning for the possibility of a quick collapse of the Afghan military and state.  But the reality is that any American withdrawal, at any time and with the best of planning, was going to be messy, if not (to use the favored term in the media) “chaotic.”

For a balanced perspective, see this piece from the characteristically sensible David Leonhardt. Leonhardt faults Biden’s media critics for the naive presumption

…that there was a clean solution for the U.S., if only the Biden administration (and, to a lesser extent, the Trump administration) had executed it. The commentary never quite spells out what the solution was, though.”

Leonhardt quotes his Times colleague Helene Cooper: “The pullout was never going to be a simple thing,” says Helene, who covers the Pentagon. “It was always going to be an ugly pullout.”  One impediment to advance planning for the exit was our Afghan allies.  In his last meeting with Biden in June, the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, asked that the US keep its preparations for withdrawal “low-key” so as not to signal a lack of faith in the Afghan government.  Ghani wanted the US to be “conservative” in issuing exit visas to Afghans.  So, the US would have had to be discrete about its evacuation planning, but, as Leonhardt points out, a huge, quiet evacuation plan is a contradiction in terms.

Alex Shepherd at The New Republic takes a deeper look at the media’s Afghan coverage, starting with the failure over 20 years to seriously scrutinize the endless claims of progress in Afghanistan that US spokesmen regularly put out.  But the withdrawal was a different, dramatic new story:

The status quo in Afghanistan was terrible, untenable, and bad—but it had slogged into that state of being for more than a decade. The situation at the Kabul airport, by contrast, was shiny, new, and—even better!—had some zingy visuals. The media remains abysmal at covering long, slow-moving crises….”

Then, too, there’s the symbiosis between the Washington foreign policy establishment and the press, an incestuous relationship formed early in the Cold War. Shepherd points to “…the coziness between foreign policy elites and reporters who rely on them for information.”  The establishment continues to affirm the necessity for American global dominance, which more than occasionally requires the use of military force. As a result,

The biases of interventionists and hawks flow frictionlessly into news coverage, treating the exit from Afghanistan as a capitulation and outrage, rather than as one—and perhaps the best—of a number of bad options.”

I think Shepherd is right in suspecting that the subtext of much of the current criticism of Biden is that we needed to stay in Afghanistan longer. And much of that criticism comes from people who one way or another contributed to the last 20 years of failure. Skepticism is warranted.

The bottom line, for me, is: is there any reason to believe that G.W. Bush or Obama or Trump would have done a better job of getting out of Afghanistan?  I don’t think so.