This Democrat Advised Biden's Botched Afghanistan Withdrawal – Now She Wants Your Vote

Five years out from Abbey Gate, and one of the people who helped design that withdrawal is now asking voters to trust her judgment again. That's not a gotcha, that's just the resume. Thirteen service members died at that gate. Hundreds more were wounded. Afghans who trusted us fell from the wheel wells of departing planes. Whatever the internal memos said, whatever caveats got attached in some meeting room, the outcome was catastrophic and it happened on her watch as an adviser.

We get that people change jobs, get promoted, move on from bad chapters. But running for office is different from taking a new gig at a think tank. It's asking for a renewed grant of trust from the public, and voters are entitled to ask a direct question: what did you actually argue for in that room, and were you right? "I was just advising" is not an answer, it's a dodge. Advisers who got the biggest foreign policy failure in a generation wrong don't get to skip the accountability conversation just because their name wasn't on the final order.

None of this means every person tied to that withdrawal is permanently disqualified from public life. People deserve a chance to explain themselves, own mistakes, show what they learned. But that explanation has to actually happen, in public, before the vote, not get waved away as old news five years later. The families of those 13 troops don't get amnesia on the anniversary. Neither should the voters being asked to hire her.