IN AFGHANISTAN, JOE BIDEN
Jim Geraghty points to a sharp exchange Joe Biden had in 2010 with Richard Holbrooke, then President Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Biden angrily told Holbrooke:
I am not sending my boy back [to Afghanistan] to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights. It just won’t work, that’s not what they’re there for.
At one level, Biden was making a fair point. Our troops weren’t in Afghanistan to defend women’s rights — we had other good reasons to be there — and defending women’s rights would not, standing alone, justify maintaining U.S. forces there.
But Biden’s reference to “my boy,” Beau Biden, is worth considering as we try to figure out why Biden recklessly pulled U.S. forces out of Afghanistan — a move that neither Obama nor Donald Trump was quite willing to make.
Geraghty points out that a few months before Biden’s exchange with Holbrooke, Beau Biden had suffered a mild stroke. Three years later, he was diagnosed with brain cancer, from which he died in 2015.
Joe Biden later speculated that his son’s brain cancer was the result of serving in Iraq. In 2018, he said that toxins found in smoke from burning waste at U.S. military installations in Iraq could “play a significant role” in causing veterans to develop cancer. And in 2019, he said that because of Beau’s “exposure to burn pits, in my view, I can’t prove it yet, he came back with stage four glioblastoma.”
Thus, Biden blames our intervention in Iraq for his son’s death. And since Biden voted in favor of that intervention, he might well blame himself.
It’s generally not good practice to attribute an official’s public policy decisions to psychological influences. But in this case, Biden arguably invites such attribution by having referred to his son during his argument with Holbrooke. As Geraghty says:
Biden saw the debate about the U.S. presence in Afghanistan in exceptionally personal terms. . .It is fair to wonder if Biden still sees Afghanistan in these exceptionally personal terms. Biden didn’t think Afghanistan was worth risking his son’s life in 2010; he doesn’t think it’s worth risking any American service member’s life now.
It’s also fair to wonder whether Biden sees defending any faraway country as worth risking American lives to defend. Taiwan, for example.
Red China and Taiwan must be wondering the same thing.
Meanwhile, we can only hope that Biden’s Afghan pullout won’t cost the lives of more Americans — civilians who didn’t sign up to fight — than the few troops who were dying defending Afghanistan against the Taliban.
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