At 4:53 PM, Kabul time, on August 29, 2021—while Americans were enduring a putrid summer hunkered down at home amid Covid’s “Delta wave”—a U.S. unmanned drone (then a relatively unheard-of technology) bombarded a 1996 white Toyota Corolla. United States Central Command (CENTCOM) killed 10 people, including seven children.
It was a mistake.
That September, CENTCOM’s jefe de jefes Frank McKenzie told reporters in Washington, “We now assess that it is unlikely that the vehicle and those who died were associated with [Islamic State – Khorasan Province] or were a direct threat to U.S. forces.”
McKenzie continued, “I offer my profound condolences to the family and friends of those who were killed. This strike was taken in the earnest belief that it would prevent an imminent threat to our forces and the evacuees at [Hamid Karzai International Airport].”
He did not equivocate: “But it was a mistake and I offer my sincere apology. As the combatant commander, I am fully responsible for this strike and its tragic outcome.”
While perhaps mundane and riddled with military-speak, it was big of any authority figure in those years, a time when we now know a vast array of Washington officials were lying—not only about the “Global War on Terror” and the American “mission” in Afghanistan, but also the Covid “crisis”—to tell the truth and to apologize.
Though McKenzie has gone on to enjoy the post-military career of a craven hawk (that all-too-comfortable web of nebulous associations and think-tank perches for the retired brass), his political management of the situation matched the assessment of the man given by my late mentor, the military historian and Middle East advisor Mark Perry.
“McKenzie is viewed by his colleagues as one of the most politically astute officers to ever head up the US Central Command—a notable change from his sometimes controversial predecessor Army Gen. Joseph Votel,” Perry wrote in 2019. “Votel was outspoken and opinionated, and he bickered…. That won’t happen under McKenzie.… At the Pentagon, McKenzie worked to dampen the growing competition between combatant commanders.” (Perry died, maddeningly, a week before the fall of Kabul.)
McKenzie disagreed with the decision by the Americans to leave. That long-reported fact is now blared out again in a new agitprop documentary by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, on then-President Joe Biden’s decision to exit Afghanistan that summer. But McKenzie conducted himself, in the fog of war, as a professional, executing a strategy that was not his.
After the U.S. made the opposite decision in 2026—to enter into a new war in a neighboring Greater Middle Eastern country—the Pentagon under Secretary Pete Hegseth and CENTCOM (helmed by Adm. Brad Cooper, who was described to me by one senior administration official as a “made man” in the “CENTCOM mafia”) has seemed notably more spiritually dishonest, and far more messianic.
While the exodus from Afghanistan was imperfect, the conduct of the boring Biden Pentagon deserves more credit.
President Biden got the strategy in Afghanistan right. He was right. He was right for years—going back over a decade, to his time as vice president, when he reportedly considered resigning over then-President Barack Obama’s gargantuan troop surge there.
“Tomorrow [President Obama] is going to make a fateful decision regarding Afghanistan—as I sat looking out the window at the sea—thinking I should resign in protest over what will bring his administration down,” Biden wrote in an “Af/Pak” pad he put to use during National Security Council meetings in 2009, as divulged by former Special Counsel Robert Hur.
Though “nostalgia” is not the right word for 2021 (that year was not a particularly great vintage) or the Biden presidency (ditto), this episode—the choice to leave Afghanistan for real—deserves commendation from someone, anyone. And since Biden has been abandoned by his own party and remains a joke on the right, I guess the defense of his Afghanistan policy (along with a few other aspects of his presidency) is going to fall to the executive director of The American Conservative.
Biden will always be fascinating to me. He is an excellent example of someone who probably made the fullest use he could of his mental and physical gifts. Biden was and is not brilliant. But he’s smart. He works hard. He reads, in his way.
Biden was and is not a beautiful man. He is not Jack Kennedy, on whom he modeled his life and family (with a hauntingly similar mix of true triumph and vicious tragedy). But he is physically striking, dapper, arguably the best-dressed and most well-styled president of my lifetime.
Biden was and is a bullshitter and a blowhard. But that tendency had receded somewhat by the time he became vice president and president. That’s why I don’t necessarily buy the common argument that he would have been a better president younger. There is a classic vitality vs. wisdom tradeoff here. (Though it’s much more likely the end of his reign would have been avoided.)
I’m not sure he always was—“Biden disappoints everyone,” as a comment famously attributed to Ted Kaufman (arguably Biden’s best friend) has it—but by the time he became president, I think Biden was a fundamentally good man.
Biden was overmatched by Ukraine, where he was an orthodox liberal and not dextrous enough to develop original views or exert independent command. He was done in, eventually, by his own physical limitations. Biden was arrogant about the latter, but presidents are unavoidably a little arrogant, and he got unlucky. (What if he had never agreed to that early debate? Would he be president today?)
His record on Gaza is ghastly, and his relative trust in Benjamin Netanyahu and the unambiguous virtue of the Israeli project—“I’m a Zionist,” Biden often declared, famously and sometimes oddly—blots his record with the biggest sin in Washington: being a sucker. He contributed to the evils of Covid and “Woke 1,” as I guess we’re calling it. (It was indeed “crazy.”)
But Biden was very plausibly the best possible Democrat to lead the country at the time. If conservatives are honest, Trump’s reelection in 2020 would have been an unfathomably dark and grinding affair. Even Trump and his aides know he is more powerful than ever by virtue of his unprecedented comeback.
Biden got inflation wrong. But so did a lot of people, and most of “the smart set” at the turn of the decade.
But Biden worked with, or at least didn’t massively interfere with, the Federal Reserve’s efforts to land the plane without triggering an economic recession. (We shall see if we’re about to be so fortunate this presidential term.) That is still a wild triumph.
I’m a borderline Paulite “end/audit the Fed” guy, but honesty compels one to concede that Jerome Powell is an actual, living American statesman. I struggle to think of another one. (Perhaps James Baker?)
Still, the failure of the Biden zeal for spending was and is disquieting—no one truly authoritative really, in his heart of hearts, knows with high conviction how to handle the economy after the Covid-era spending bonanza and its consensus failure (a somewhat but not entirely fair judgment). But that’s not really Biden’s fault. It is the new, frightening human reality.
If Biden had won, and his cancer had progressed at the same pace (an assumption—the mind’s power over the body is a mysterious thing), one wonders whether he would have resigned in office. I tend to think he would have. But it’s unknowable.
Biden’s Treaty Room address announcing the withdrawal from Afghanistan and his defenses of the fundamental policy amid the chaos in August 2021 are still, I believe, the bravest, best things a president has done in my lifetime.
That is a sad commentary on American leadership in the 21st century, but there you have it. Biden was not great, but he was commanding and interesting, and perpetually underrated, which is inherently sympathetic.
And, although it pains me to say it, one can no longer make an intellectually credible argument that Trump (who negotiated the original deal with the Taliban) wouldn’t have gotten rolled by the generals if reelected in 2020. This is, of course, also unknowable. But he was rolled by the generals on Afghanistan when he was elected the first time in 2016. And our present war in Iran is a mighty big counterpoint to the theory that, when push comes to shove, Trump’s true convictions matter.
Biden got it done. So: thank you, Mr. President.
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