The short answer to, “What happened in Afghanistan” is that the military wanted a total pullout of all Americans, believing that the Taliban would take over after the withdrawal of military forces, while the State Department refused to develop a plan for an evacuation until the last minute, insisting that it had a diplomatic solution for integrating the Taliban into the government.

The blame game has been quietly playing out for some time, but whom did Biden side with?

One book offers an answer.

Biden was wary of the Defense Department — something Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was focused on remedying.

Biden was partial to the State Department, given his time chairing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

His skepticism of the Pentagon grew after the Obama administration’s debate in 2009 about a troop surge in Afghanistan. Biden felt the Pentagon boxed Obama in politically, Ward writes.

We know Biden was obsessed on that point. He had supposedly even threatened to resign over it.

Austin is a weak figure (even before he was hospitalized twice) and had come out of Secretary of State Blinken’s Pine Island Capital all but ensuring that he would make the Pentagon subordinate to the State Department.

The State Department called the shots, and we had another Hanoi-style evac under fire, complete with leaving Americans behind.

On May 8, 2021, during a rehearsal for the evacuation operation with Sullivan, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and others, the Pentagon and the State Department feuded over whether they had to close the U.S. embassy in Kabul as troops withdrew.

The Defense Department argued that the country would be too dangerous to have the embassy try to do business as usual.

Brian McKeon, the deputy secretary of state for management and resources, jumped in and said their diplomats would be fine: “We at the State Department have a much higher risk tolerance than you guys,” he told the uniformed personnel.

Ward writes that “Milley nearly jumped out of his chair, but restrained himself from shouting how he and many serving in the armed forces had lost friends in war. Austin showed no signs of anger, but he later told colleagues that he was offended by McKeon’s remark.”

And what did Milley do apart from “almost” yelling at the meeting? Nothing. Beyond (as usual) leaking the report later in order to later cover his ass.

Biden sided with State. And he was fine with it.

After Afghanistan, “no one offered to resign, in large part because the president didn’t believe anyone had made a mistake. Ending the war was always going to be messy,” Politico’s Alexander Ward writes in “The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore Foreign Policy After Trump.”

“Biden told his top aides, [National Security Advisor Jake] Sullivan included, that he stood by them and they had done their best during a tough situation.”

“There wasn’t even a real possibility of a shake-up,” a White House official told Ward.

There’s been a lot of talk about Biden’s senility. And yes, he’s mentally slipped, but the bottom line is he was calling the shots and doing so in line with his past beliefs.

Some conservatives insist on acting like he’s a puppet who’s just being controlled remotely by Obama, not only is this a terrible election argument, but it lets him off the hook. Biden may be suffering from diminished capacity, but he’s a bastard who places very little value on American lives or honor, and he was shrugging at the human cost of his withdrawal even while it was going on.

Biden’s decision to side with the State Department turned the withdrawal into a catastrophe. Ultimately he allowed State to call the shots, leaving Americans in the path of an invading Taliban army.

The buck stops with him.