What is the 'Biden doctrine?' Afghanistan pullout offers clues
WASHINGTON — More than a decade before presiding over America’s exit from Afghanistan, then-Sen. Joe Biden famously threw down his napkin during 2009 dinner with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president at the time, and walked out.
What he’d heard from Karzai had not convinced him that the U.S., through its military might, could fix what was broken in Afghanistan. Biden, just elected vice president but not yet inaugurated, flew home to brief President-elect Barack Obama, telling him the country had “deteriorated over the last six years.”
“The truth is that things are going to get tougher in Afghanistan before they get better,” Biden told Obama as reporters were briefly allowed into the January 2009 meeting.
So it was no surprise to his longtime former aides that Biden, now in charge, acted to end the war. What surprised some was how he did it. Jonah Blank, who advised him for nine years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Biden knew where he stood on keeping troops in Afghanistan by the time he returned from that trip.
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