President Biden on Tuesday got to give the speech that each of his three immediate predecessors had hoped they could: the one bookending the culmination of the war in Afghanistan. But it was not the speech that any of them would have liked to have given, centered in part on the fact that the two-decade-long mission had failed to create a stable, democratic nation.
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Most immediately, Biden’s intent in giving the speech was to reframe an understanding of the U.S. exit that has been centered on the specifics of the withdrawal. The president had repeatedly insisted that Americans who wanted to leave Afghanistan would be able to do so; that some number (pegged in the “low hundreds” by one official on Monday) could not is an obvious failure. So Biden celebrated the scale of the withdrawal that followed the Taliban’s seizure of Kabul, conflating, as his administration often has, evacuations conducted by the U.S. military with evacuations that the military enabled through its management of the airport. He also reinforced the valid point that the collapse of the Afghan opposition to the Taliban occurred far faster than expected, limiting the evacuation window — though, of course, this was itself a failure of American intelligence.
Most of all, Biden’s aim with the speech was to remind people that they weren’t enthusiastic about the war in the first place. Polling from the Pew Research Center released on Tuesday found that a majority of Americans supported the U.S. withdrawal, with 7 in 10 deeming the overall effort a failure. But since announcing his plan to remove U.S. forces in April, Biden has often found himself pushing back not against support for the war but indifference toward it. Americans didn’t really support the war, but it continued for two decades in part because it also wasn’t at the forefront of their minds. In other words, Biden wanted not only to defend how the war ended but to increase the salience for Americans of why he thought it should.
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To reach that outcome, his speech repeatedly invoked the question of cost.
“When I hear that we could have, should have continued the so-called low-grade effort in Afghanistan,” he said at one point, “at low risk to our service members at low cost — I don’t think enough people understand how much we have asked of the 1 percent of this country who put that uniform on.”
The human toll of the war in Afghanistan has, in fact, been measured far less in deaths on the battlefield — slightly more U.S. troops died in Afghanistan than in the War of 1812 — but, Biden argued, in the wear on those troops and their loved ones. (He also invoked his son Beau Biden, who served in Iraq before his death in 2015.)
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“A lot of our veterans and their families have gone through hell. Deployment after deployment. Months and years away from their families. Missed birthdays, anniversaries. Empty chairs at holidays. Financial struggles. Divorces. Loss of limbs. Traumatic brain injury. Post-traumatic stress,” he said. “We see it in the struggles many have when they come home.” Eighteen veterans die by suicide in the United States each day, Biden said, a statistic tallied by the Department of Veterans Affairs that applied to the year 2018.
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Biden also cited the financial cost to the country. A study from the Costs of War project at Brown University estimated that the war had cost $2.3 trillion over its two decades, about $1.5 trillion of which was costs directly related to overseas operations (excluding veteran care or interest on borrowed financing). That $2.3 trillion figure amounted to about $300 million a day, Biden said.
“What have we lost as a consequence in terms of opportunities?” he asked.
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The challenge with that argument, like the one about the effects on the families of those who served, is that for many Americans it is abstract.
To an average person, $320 million a day (a more specific value for the war’s cost) sounds like an incomprehensibly large amount of money. But in 2020 the government spent an average of $18 billion a day, 57 times as much. The government spends $320 million every half-hour. The cost of the war over those two decades amounts to about a dollar a day per American, $365 of your annual taxes.
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Biden and Democrats are also advocating for an expansion of government spending that would tally $3.5 trillion over a decade, more money in a shorter period. That money will go toward what Biden — and, according to polling, most Americans — would obviously view as preferable opportunities for spending, but attempting to incense people at the outrageous cost of the conflict very much risks dumping more poison in the already-toxic well that is public opinion on government spending.
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“There’s nothing low-grade or low-risk or low-cost about any war,” Biden said near the end of his remarks, a pointed effort to remind the public that every day for the past two decades there was a cost and a risk being borne largely out of sight. Costs and risks, Biden argued, that necessitated ending the war sooner rather than later.
Unfortunately for that argument, it’s not clear that Americans who didn’t already appreciate those costs and risks now will. It’s also not clear how uniformly those who could tangibly appreciate them — the troops who’ve served in Afghanistan, their families and, of course, the quiet economy of consultants and corporations that steadily consumed those hundreds of millions of dollars — support how the conflict was truncated, if at all. Members of that latter group almost certainly don’t, which, to a large extent, is why the war lasted two decades in the first place.
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Biden is making a bet that the turmoil of the past two weeks will be a footnote on what happened in Afghanistan over the course of the U.S. engagement. After all, the crumpled evacuation of Saigon occurred in 1975. When the story of the Vietnam War is told, the focus is not on what President Gerald Ford did at that moment but, instead, on what former presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon did to create it.
But, then, Ford also didn’t win a second term in office.