Joe Biden, once hailed as a “breath of fresh air” by a British political class where even the so-called Conservative Party tracks liberal-left, is facing an unprecedented barrage of criticism in America’s mother country for his botched handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Tom Tugendhat, a senior backbench MP for the governing party who chairs the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee and once served in Afghanistan as a Territorial Army officer, branded the elderly Democrat’s attempt to pin the blame for the fiasco on the Western-backed Afghan government forces “shameful” in an emergency parliamentary debate.
“Those who have never fought for the colours they fly should be careful about criticising those who have,” Tugendhat added, a remark interpreted as a reference to Biden’s own lack of a service record — which he owes in part to a large number of draft deferments during the Vietnam War.
Former Conservative Party leader and Cabinet minister Sir Iain Duncan Smith, another veteran — although not of the Afghan conflict — also accused Biden’s shifting responsibility to the Afghans as a “shameful excuse” for his administration’s failure in the country, prompting Sir Keir Starmer, leader of an opposition Labour Party generally at pains to avoid criticising the Democrats, to agree that Biden’s characterisation of the situation was “wrong”.
Owen Paterson, another former Cabinet minister from the Conservative Party, called the fall of Kabul to Taliban forces “the U.S.’s biggest humiliation since Saigon,” when America was forced to evacuate people from the roof of its embassy in South Vietnam as communist forces swept over the city.
Paterson also lambasted Biden for appearing to hide from the public and the press as the disaster unfolds, calling it “shameful that the President of the United States, leader of the free world, cannot face questions from his own hostile press corp and attacks the Afghan army for cowardice.”
Criticism of President Biden was no less fierce in the House of Lords, where Lord Howard — another former leader of the Conservative Party — said the botched withdrawal “is, and will be seen by history as, a catastrophic mistake which may well prove to be the defining legacy of his presidency”.
Steven Swinford, political editor of the The Times, received similar reports of the Biden administration letting its allies down, saying that “Senior military commanders have also not been party to key discussions between the U.S. and the Taliban, so were left in the dark about when they could be forced to pull out.”
Government sources have also been telling the left-wing Guardian that they fear Biden will not bother to keep his allies informed as to when the U.S. will be completing his withdrawal, and that an abrupt departure of American personnel could leave them high and dry while evacuations are still being attempted.
Open criticism of the U.S. President by serving members of the British government has been limited — but not non-existent, with even the normally sycophantic Boris Johnson appearing to take a swipe at him by telling MPs that “The West could not continue this U.S.-led mission – a mission conceived and executed in support and defence of America – without American logistics, without U.S. air power”.
Cabinet-level ministers are beginning to brief their displeasure with the Biden administration behind the scenes, however, with some appearing to accuse him of keeping allies in the dark about the practicalities of withdrawal — echoing the publicly expressed sentiments of former defence minister Khalid that”The Biden government have just come in and, without looking at what is happening on the ground, have taken a unilateral decision, throwing us and everybody else to the fire.”
Britain’s defence minister Ben Wallace, with clear frustration in his voice, echoed these feelings on the withdrawal having been too hasty in comments to the BBC on Thursday morning when he said that every day longer British forces are able to remain in Kabul is a “real benefit to us all”.
Ben Riley-Smith, political editor of the notionally conservative Telegraph newspaper, which is close to the Tory government, was told that Prime Minister “had been attempting to get Mr Biden on the phone to discuss Kabul falling from Monday morning”, but was unable to speak to the 78-year-old American until “close to 10 p.m. on Tuesday”.