Washington is in its element: there is failure in Afghanistan, but there are no scapegoats

On September 1, US President Joe Biden called the US withdrawal from Afghanistan incredibly successful. However, few people know that even in the midst of the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, the third person in the US state hierarchy, Nancy Pelosi, declared August 24 the day of great pride of the United States and the Democrats. The events taking place now in the United States, 20 years ago, would have been called surrealism. However, the proclamation of victories against the background of a clear catastrophe for everyone clearly reflects the current decline of America.

On August 24, the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the US Congress, Nancy Pelosi, declared: "Today is a great day of pride for our country and for the Democrats. We have a president with a big, bold vision of our country, an unprecedented opportunity to fulfil our promises to the people."

The bottom line is that in the midst of the "Afghan crisis", Nancy Pelosi called a special session in the House of Representatives, recalling lawmakers from the holidays. During this short session, having suppressed the resistance of the "moderate" part of the party, and only at the expense of their own majority, the Democrats managed to adopt a budget plan for $3.5 trillion (potentially 5 trillion).

Although this decision does not yet have the status of a law and requires approval in the Senate, it launches a procedure through which numerous lobbyists in the US Congress can more confidently promote the interests of their owners when allocating budget funds.

Working day and night, and again, thanks to their own majority, the Democrats voted for the "Law on the Expansion of Voting Rights". This law partially restores the requirements of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 regarding the prohibition of changes in the electoral legislation by State Congresses without the supervision of the Department of Justice, which was an echo of the struggle for the rights of black voters.

The adopted bill contradicts three decisions of the US Supreme Court regarding the holding of elections and the procedure for changing electoral legislation. Democrats in the House of Representatives openly declare that their legislative initiative goes against the position of 6 conservative judges of the US Supreme Court.

Nancy Pelosi admitted that the purpose of the bill is to counteract the legislative initiative of a number of Republican states to tighten electoral legislation, in particular, the presentation of an identity card for voting. Later, speaking at the White House, Joe Biden praised Nancy Pelosi for her masterful work.

In a past article, "The United States is entering an era of a power crisis", it was described how the executive branch of government in the United States is trying to "bend" the judicial one: on August 3, the Joe Biden administration, in violation of the Supreme Court decision, extended the moratorium on the eviction of Americans from rented housing. The US Supreme Court ordered to resolve this issue by passing a separate law by Congress, but Nancy Pelosi then refused to convene a special session of the House of Representatives for this purpose.

On August 26, the Supreme Court finally overturned the decision of the Joe Biden administration in favour of landlords, and now another social crisis is looming for Joe Biden with a mass of 15 million people who soon face being on the street.

The leader of the Republican minority in the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, summing up the urgent session of the House of Representatives, said that Nancy Pelosi ignored the crisis in Afghanistan, and the Democrats unanimously refused the Republican proposal to clarify the real number of Americans remaining there.

"We had reports that the president called people, that former presidents called people, that people were threatened, that their spouses were threatened about jobs," McCarthy said.

It was only about money, not a single dollar out of the distributed 5 trillion was allocated to solve the problems of Americans stuck in Afghanistan. McCarthy called the Democratic leadership self-serving people for passing the election law during this urgent session at a time when the country expected something completely different from them. "This is a shameful day for America, this is a shameful day for this chamber, and it's just a shame that they came out with such an initiative," Kevin McCarthy said in conclusion.

Of course, it is useless to appeal to the conscience of politicians. In an interview with ABC on August 19, Joe Biden refused to admit that there were mistakes in the US’ withdrawal from Afghanistan. During the same interview, he declared that American troops could remain in Afghanistan after August 31. However, on August 26, White House press Secretary Jen Psaki stated that Joe Biden had never considered the possibility of maintaining any US armed forces in Afghanistan after the designated deadline of August 31.

However, the current political elite of the United States does not even have a sense of self-preservation, since without declaring the "culprit of failure", the public itself is trying to understand the situation. The longer the government postpones the moment of punishing the perpetrators, the more unsightly facts may emerge in the information space.

For example, an article has already been published in The New York Times newspaper that says American contractors who served the Afghan Air Force, back in July, not only took some of the equipment with them, but also removed vital software, in particular, anti-missile protection for helicopters. As a result, a significant part of the Afghan Air Force was incapacitated.

It is not difficult to understand that this news may have negative consequences that go far beyond the "Afghan crisis" itself, since buyers of American weapons have a serious reason to think.

One might think that the US government is trying to "make a good face at a bad game". This is probably partly true, but after the White House "woke up" from the footage of Afghans falling from the sky and began to organise the evacuation, complaints went to the press from the administration that the media did not cover their heroic efforts enough and concentrated only on shortcomings.

Even after the terrorist attack at the Kabul airport on August 26, which claimed the lives of 13 American soldiers, through representatives of the US Democratic Party there were complaints about the media that they did not understand the whole situation in which the White House administration, overcoming difficulties, organises the rescue of Americans.

Therefore, the absence of even attempts to determine the reasons for the failure in Afghanistan should not surprise us. Decision-makers in the US government were not going to reflect on this topic, they expected praise for their "efforts to save Americans".

"We completed one of the biggest airlifts in history, with more than 120,000 people evacuated to safety.  That number is more than double what most experts thought were possible.  No nation — no nation has ever done anything like it in all of history.

Only the United States had the capacity and the will and the ability to do it, and we did it today. The extraordinary success of this mission was due to the incredible skill, bravery, and selfless courage of the United States military and our diplomats and intelligence professionals,” Joe Biden declared quite expectedly.

In part, it is even sad to see how part of the American elite is fighting for pieces of the budget and trying to prolong their political life by destroying the tree of separation of powers, at the very moment when their country is falling down from the "geopolitical Olympus", and the White House ignores what is happening.

At the same time, the public wants to know why the airfield in Bagram was abruptly abandoned by the US Army? Who made the decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan in such a way that the contingent had to be increased in order to evacuate civilians? Who coordinated the evacuation plan so that several hundred Americans remained in Afghanistan? CNN is asking such questions, because there are still more than three years of the Biden administration ahead, and with such a level of decision-making, the prospects in international affairs clearly cause concern for sober-minded people.

On FOX News, they ask themselves a simple question – "who will resign because of the disaster in Afghanistan?". However, at the same time, they state that neither the Department of Defence, nor the State Department, nor the White House are going to admit the mistakes made. The fact that the question of the responsibility of anyone was not raised by the Joe Biden administration was confirmed by White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

Of course, Democrats are increasingly using the narrative that the "Afghan crisis" will be forgotten by the 2022 congressional elections, since the average American is more interested in their own well-being than in US foreign policy.

However, by this very congressional election, the Republicans may have the results of the investigation into the failure of the evacuation in Afghanistan in their hands, and the relatives of the fallen soldiers will help to unleash the public’s emotions. Therefore, this narrative is very controversial. And in general, it is not yet clear how the Joe Biden administration will cope with a number of other crises that have engulfed the United States, and whether it will be able to raise the level of well-being of Americans in the face of rising inflation.

Some Republican congressmen have already announced the need to impeach Joe Biden, who is publicly trying to take responsibility for himself, but the party leadership did not support this idea. From a tactical point of view, the Republican Party benefits from the predictably weak old Joe Biden in political terms, they do not want surprises for the 2024 election.

As was reported by FOX News, a group of Republican congressmen is already preparing articles of impeachment for the head of the State Department, Anthony Blinkеn. This is probably the same tactic that the Democrats used against the administration of Donald Trump, knocking out key people from his team.

This option looks quite promising. Sooner or later, someone will have to be made the scapegoat anyway, and if public opinion is focused on Blinkеn in a timely manner, his departure will be an acceptable sacrifice in the eyes of the electorate, even the Democrats.

In sum, there is the desire to say that the statements made by some experts - that after the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, the United States will only become stronger, as it was after the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam, and the subsequent invasions of Grenada and Panama, and then the victory in the Cold War over the USSR - are not well-founded. The current elite of the United States does not want to take any responsibility and analyse the mistakes made, it is fighting for the preservation of power, and not for the future of the country.