The tragic politicization of the Afghanistan withdrawal

Last month, President Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery with the families of soldiers killed in a suicide bombing during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan three years earlier; Trump was invited by the families, but his visit appeared to violate rules prohibiting political activity in that part of the cemetery, and two of his campaign aides reportedly shoved an official who tried to remind them of that fact. Since then, the story has continued to generate a smattering of news coverage: last week, top Democratic lawmakers called on the Army—which essentially rebuked the Trump aides’ conduct, but then said that it considered the matter closed—to provide more information about the incident; over the weekend, the Washington Post explored how some relatives of the bombing victims became prominent Trump supporters, with the help of a political operative who allegedly told them they could use “political stunts” to draw attention to their cause. (The operative and some of the families deny that he said this.) Largely, though, the story has faded from media view, “eclipsed,” as the Daily Beast political reporter Roger Sollenberger put it on Sunday, by Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets.

As I and Ben Kesling have both written for CJR, the cemetery incident was somewhat underplayed even at the time, with coverage often failing to reflect the gravity of the allegations against Trump and his staff, and sometimes looking past them to instead center Trump’s preferred framing: his indictment of the Afghanistan withdrawal. The latter has emerged as a consistent campaign talking point for Republicans, and has stayed in the news since the cemetery stunt. Last Monday, a Republican-led House committee published a report excoriating “the Biden-Harris administration’s” “willful blindness” around the withdrawal; the report was widely covered, often under headlines that centered the excoriation, even though, as the New York Times noted, it offered “few new insights” as to what could have been done differently and “appeared timed to tarnish” Harris. The next day, congressional leaders presented the bombing victims’ families with the Congressional Gold Medal. That night, Trump raised the bombing during his debate with Harris on ABC. Later, David Muir, one of the moderators, returned to the topic, referring to the “poignant moment today on Capitol Hill” and asking Harris whether she believes she bears responsibility for the circumstances of the withdrawal. (The incident at Arlington didn’t come up at all.)

Much of this recent coverage has been appropriately nuanced or caveated, prominently noting the charge that Trump and his allies are politicizing the withdrawal for electoral purposes or giving space to other voices (including Democrats on the committee that issued the report) to make that case: Politico, for instance, calculated that the report mentioned Harris’s name over two hundred and fifty times (compared to a prior interim report that mentioned her just twice); on CBS, which first obtained the report, Margaret Brennan asked Michael McCaul, the chair of the committee, “Is this politics?” The coverage also often noted claims that Trump bears responsibility for the chaos of the withdrawal given that it was his deal with the Taliban that set it in motion. (Muir asked Trump to respond to this charge at the debate. “​​I told Abdul don’t do it anymore,” Trump replied, referring to Taliban killings of US soldiers and misnaming the head of the Taliban.) The same week as the Arlington incident, the NPR reporters who broke that story, Tom Bowman and Quil Lawrence, went further, reminding listeners that “whenever the evacuation happened, it was going to be difficult,” and that “there is a lot of failure to go around to the four presidents over the 20 years of war.”

Even that excellent segment, however, did not mention the name of the president who started the war, George W. Bush. Neither did any of ten stories that I read on the committee report in major outlets. This might sound like nitpicking, but it extends a pattern that I first noted on the day that Kabul fell to the Taliban in 2021, when the subject dominated the Sunday shows without Bush’s name being spoken a single time. As I argued then, this was symbolic, at least in some small way, of a “depressing vacuum” in coverage of the withdrawal, one marked by an amnesia, amid much angry blame-casting on cable news, as to how the war began in the first place and how its early execution set the stage for all that happened thereafter. (Apparently, Maureen Dowd agreed with me.) This is absolutely not to say that the tragic specifics of the withdrawal didn’t demand scrutiny back then—they did, and they still do. It’s to say that any helpful media discussion of the withdrawal needed to look at it holistically, as an output of failures by both parties and a mindset that they once shared.

As I wrote at the time, the discussion that we actually got was, on the whole, inflamed and short-termist—often slanted, at least implicitly, in ways that reflected kindly on American military interventionism, and often delivered by talking heads whose personal complicity in the failures of the war was rarely adequately challenged. Too often, Afghan lives were a relative afterthought—including following the suicide bombing, which killed around a hundred and seventy Afghans in addition to the thirteen US service members. (“All the newspapers and all the magazines spoke about the American troops that were killed,” a man whose brother died told the LA Times at the time. “It’s frustrating, because Afghan murder, Afghan dead, Afghan blood—it’s not important.”) To my eye, these mistakes have too often repeated themselves in the recent coverage, albeit on a smaller, subtler scale. And, as Kesling noted in the context of the Arlington story that arguably kicked off this round of coverage, it has commonly been filtered through the all-consuming prism of the horse race as the election nears.

If it feels odd to ask news organizations to mention Bush more in election coverage fifteen years after his departure from the White House, it’s worth noting that he has already featured in this coverage in other contexts, from the (false) rumor that he might be a surprise speaker at the Democratic National Convention to his confirmation that he doesn’t plan to endorse anyone this cycle. Meanwhile, some figures who served in his administration have endorsed Harris (who, in pointing out this fact, contributed the only mention of Bush in last week’s debate) and made a media splash in doing so, most prominently Dick Cheney, Bush’s influential vice president. (Of the stories that I read about this in nine major outlets, only two mentioned his record on Afghanistan, though a few others did mention his key role in the invasion of Iraq.) In my newsletter the day after Kabul fell to the Taliban, I also noted that Cheney’s daughter Liz was interviewed on the withdrawal almost as a detached pundit, despite having served in the State Department during the Bush administration. Recently, she, too, has made a splash by endorsing Harris, without her hawkish record being a focus.

In many ways, this is perfectly understandable—in recent years, Cheney has reinvented herself as a rare right-wing dissenter against Trump’s attacks on US democracy, a stance that cost her her seat in Congress and that plays into the key story of this political moment. Still, as I wrote in 2022, Cheney’s hawkish views—and how they’ve been (at least partially) left behind by the Trump-led Republican Party—have always been an important subplot to this story about domestic democracy; fast-forward two years, and it’s worth interrogating what her comfort with endorsing Harris says about the latter’s foreign policy vis-à-vis Trump’s. (I wished, for instance, that ABC’s Jon Karl would have followed up when Cheney said recently that Harris’s DNC speech was one “George Bush could have given.”) So far, I’ve only been able to find one story about the Cheney endorsements that has engaged this question in detail, in Mother Jones. (If I missed any, please send them my way.)

In the Trump era, many excellent stories and journalists have, of course, explored US foreign policy realignment and fatigue with the “forever wars” in more general terms. But in the day-to-day news cycle, those explorations often go unheard amid all the yelling about political conflict. So do the consequences of those forever wars in the countries where they happened, and so does the current state of those countries in general—not least Afghanistan. A few months after the withdrawal—amid a crippling humanitarian crisis in that country that was caused, in no small part, by US sanctions—I noted that while individual outlets had contributed some excellent coverage of the situation, it hadn’t inspired anywhere near the same levels of wall-to-wall, cable-newsified outrage as the withdrawal itself. Recently, there has been more good coverage of problems plaguing Afghanistan and its people, from press freedom to the visa and other challenges facing many refugees who were evacuated in 2021 and have attempted to start new lives in the US. Again, though, such stories have hardly been prominent. Recently, the head of a group that represents Afghans in the US told Al Jazeera that his community is “feeling pretty invisible this election season.”

Back in 2021, I pointed out that as the Afghanistan withdrawal consumed the news cycle, less attention was paid to a devastating earthquake that struck Haiti, exacerbating a tangled web of crises in that country that have, over the years, been deeply structured by US policy choices. These crises have been a factor in Haitian immigration to the US, where the migrants are now being baselessly accused of eating dogs and cats by Trump and his allies. If this racist rhetoric—and the threats of violence that it has triggered—has eclipsed the Arlington incident in the news cycle, then the electoral ramifications of both stories have eclipsed the urgent, unresolved question at their heart: the big one about America’s place in the world.

Other notable stories:

• Yesterday, we learned more about the attempted assassination of Trump on Sunday, with the acting director of the Secret Service telling reporters that the suspect, Ryan W. Routh, never had Trump in his line of sight and did not fire off a shot, but was apparently able to remain undetected for hours around Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach, where the incident took place. Meanwhile, Trump blamed Democrats for inciting Routh by using “inflammatory language”—while in the same breath casting Democrats as an existential threat to the country. And, amid a flurry of news reports casting Routh as a supporter of Ukraine based on his social media posts, the Kyiv Independent’s Chris York painted a more nuanced picture, finding that Routh misrepresented himself and sometimes “expressed disdain for Ukraine’s war effort.”

• President Biden sat down with Christopher Kane, of the Washington Blade—the first time that a sitting president has given an exclusive interview to a publication representing the LGBTQ community. “Writing about President Joe Biden’s legacy is difficult without the distance and time required to assess a leader of his stature, but what becomes clear from talking with him is the extent to which his views on LGBTQ rights come from the heart,” Kane reports. “Biden leads an administration that has been hailed as the most pro-LGBTQ in American history, achieving major milestones in the struggle to expand freedoms and protections for the community.” At the same time, Republican officials “have led an all-out assault against LGBTQ Americans.”

• Yesterday, a probate court in Nevada began hearing testimony in an extraordinary succession case involving Rupert Murdoch, who is trying to change the terms of an irrevocable family trust so that his son Lachlan might gain full control over his media empire at the expense of his other children, who are perceived as less conservative than Lachlan is. The existence of the legal proceedings was a secret until the New York Times disclosed some of the details in July; a coalition of news organizations subsequently asked for the proceedings to be opened to the press, but a judge rejected that idea and so they are going forward behind closed doors. 

• And Connie Chung, the longtime TV journalist who became the first woman to anchor the CBS Evening News and the first Asian American to anchor any major network news show, is out with a memoir, titled Connie. (Vanity Fair has an excerpt.) According to a review in the Washington Post, as Chung sees it, “her success in the brutal arena of network news was due to working longer and harder than almost anyone, and her ability to swear and drink like a veteran newsman.”

ICYMI: In Austin, a movement journalist named Kit O’Connell covers the trans community—and many others—as major outlets don’t.

Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.