MSNBC’s Stengel: Biden Being ‘Honest’ — U.S. Strategy ‘Was Ass-Backward from the Start’

MSNBC Political Analyst Richard Stengel said Tuesday on “Deadline ” that President Joe Biden was “honest” with the American people by saying the U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan has been “ass-backward.”

Stengel said, “Yeah. At the risk of seeming like an ivory tower professor, I just want to put the withdrawal in historical context. Here’s a disastrous withdrawal. When the British left Afghanistan in 1842, 4,500 troops left Kabul and one Englishman 11 days later arrived in Jalalabad. That was a disastrous evacuation. Here’s another one. When the British left India in 1947, 1948, just pulled out. Over the next few years, two million people died as that country was divided in half. When the French left Algeria in 1962, hundreds of thousands of people died, including thousands and thousands of Frenchmen, and that country is still not healed. Those are disastrous withdrawals. We don’t know what the extent of a truly disastrous withdrawal would have been. The counterfactuals are just immense. I mean, I think when this is looked back on, people will say, yep, he got us out of there — a terrible tragedy that 13 American servicemen and women died. We got 100,000 people out.”

On Biden’s speech, Stengel said, “I thought he was being very honest and candid, and you have to read a little bit between the lines with that, is essentially he was saying our 20-year investment in Afghanistan, $2 trillion, 800,000 servicemen, was all misbegotten. The strategy which originally started as counterterrorism and then turned into counterinsurgency and then turned to nation-building was ass-backward from the start.”

He added, “That’s pretty honest. There aren’t many American presidents who have said that to the American people — and part of the reason is, is that soldiers who made an ultimate sacrifice, they go why did that happen? Well, Biden is saying because politicians and generals and the elites and foreign policy establishment all said it was worthwhile. Well, I don’t think it is. That’s being very honest.”

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