Afghanistan dims Biden’s light — even for liberal journalists

Has anybody noticed that the so-called “best and brightest” often are neither?

Some of America’s “best and brightest” got us into a war we couldn’t win in Vietnam — and we didn’t. When things got bad, they lied and told us about the light at the end of the tunnel. Our departure was humiliating.  

We woke up one morning 20 years ago and watched in horror as the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center came under attack and then crashed into a pile of rubble. The “best and brightest” didn’t see it coming.  

They told us there were “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. There weren’t.   

If they knew what was coming on Jan. 6 at the Capitol, they didn’t do anything to stop it.

Now the “best and brightest” have shown their brilliance once again — this time it was Afghanistan that they got all wrong. Just about everything the “experts” told us turned out to be false, apparently. 

President Biden, presumably relying on the “wisdom” of those “experts,” assured us that there would be no hasty takeover by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Wrong. He told us that al Qaeda was out of Afghanistan. Wrong.

He told us there would be no real problems for Americans or our Afghan allies to get to the airport in Kabul. Wrong.

He said we were clear-eyed about the risks of leaving Afghanistan. He said the United States planned for every contingency. Wrong on both accounts. He implied he was better prepared to deal with Afghanistan than every president who came before him. “I will not repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past,” he confidently said. Instead, he made his own mistakes — and so far has taken no responsibility for anything that’s gone wrong.

It should come as no surprise that Joe Biden, who has spent his adult life in the world of politics, is — what else? — a politician, one whose No. 1 priority (despite what he says) is emerging from this with his reputation intact. 

But it’s not just his reputation that’s on the line. It’s also the reputation of his allies in the media who are being scrutinized  — by an American public that didn’t have much trust in journalists to begin with.  

It’s one thing to go easy on the president regarding the mess he exacerbated at our southern border. It’s easy enough to ignore his stumbling rhetoric, his word-salad incoherence from time to time. The media could play down the confusion coming from his administration about masks. But minimizing the chaos in Afghanistan would be a bridge too far, even for liberal journalists. 

You know Joe Biden is in trouble when even his most loyal allies in the world of journalism are calling into question his competence.

It’s one thing when Sean Hannity at Fox News bashes President Biden — just another day at his anchor desk — but when Jake Tapper at CNN says the situation in Afghanistan is a “tragic foreign policy disaster” that caught the Biden administration “flat-footed,” that’s something else. 

And Tapper’s CNN colleague, John Berman, said: “Whether or not one agrees with the president’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops, there’s no question the White House was wrong about the length of time they had, wrong about the strength of the Afghan military, wrong about the reach of the Taliban.”

Even MSNBC couldn’t pretend the president knew what he was doing. Its website ran this headline: “Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan charade.”        

And David Sanger, a senior writer at the New York Times, wrote that “Even many of Mr. Biden’s allies who believe he made the right decision to finally exit a war that the United States could not win and that was no longer in its national interest concede he made a series of major mistakes in executing the withdrawal.”

This is the kind of coverage journalists usually reserve for the likes of Donald Trump — or a lot of other Republicans they don’t like. But this is one Biden mess they couldn’t clean up or play down. The videos on television don’t lie.

And I suspect that a lot of journalists understood what was at stake in the way they covered the story: Not just Joe Biden’s credibility, but also their own. They couldn’t risk squandering what little credibility they still have — not even for a pol they were rooting for to defeat a man they loathed. So they did their job, for a welcome change.

But they’ve got plenty of time to revert to form, plenty of time to get back in good graces with their pal, the president, and to blame their favorite villain, Donald Trump, for the fiasco in Afghanistan. And there’s a very good chance that’s exactly what will happen, sooner or later. Stay tuned.

Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He was a correspondent with HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” for 22 years and previously worked as a reporter for CBS News and as an analyst for Fox News. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Patreon page. Follow him on Twitter @BernardGoldberg.