Vice President Kamala Harris has been, at least visually, front and center as President Biden has overseen America’s retreat from Afghanistan. She attends most of his security briefings and had to leave a meeting with business leaders last week to attend an urgent intelligence session as the Taliban rapidly cemented control over the country.

When the White House released a photo Sunday of Biden sitting alone at a telebriefing from the situation room in Camp David, Harris was on the other end of the screen, occupying the center square among Biden’s coterie of virtual advisors. She watched his high-profile speech Monday from a nearby room at the White House, a detail officials made sure to highlight in a continuing effort to brand the Biden-Harris administration as an unusually close team.

The harrowing images of the United States’ retreat from Kabul this week, with desperate Afghans futilely chasing a packed U.S. Air Force plane, is likely to be a defining moment in Biden’s presidency. But the execution of the withdrawal will also be added to Harris’ resume, underscoring the complex challenge she faces as Biden’s understudy during what is arguably the first crisis of his presidency.

Harris, who ran aggressively against Biden for the Democratic Party’s 2020 nomination, has been eager as vice president to be seen as loyal, while at the same time sharing in the administration’s successes to pave the way for another potential run at the top job.

She boasted on CNN, shortly after the president ordered troops withdrawn in April, that she was the last one in the room before Biden made his decision, and felt comfortable with the plan.

“The decision always rests with him,” she added, “but I have seen him over and over again make decisions based exactly on what he believes is right.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, seen in the center of the screen, and other officials met remotely with President Biden over the weekend to discuss the situation in Afghanistan.

(Associated Press)

The desire to erase any daylight between her and Biden poses two challenges: Her exact role in many of the administration’s accomplishments, such as the passage of the $1-trillion infrastructure bill in the Senate this month, is often hard to define, and it may be difficult for her to separate herself from decisions that go awry.

“The president’s legacy always falls heavily on the vice president,” said Elaine Kamarck, a former advisor to Vice President Al Gore who is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank and has studied the role of the vice president. “Hubert Humphrey could not get out from the Vietnam War. Al Gore could not get out from under something that was even less his fault — an affair and an impeachment” of President Clinton.

“It’s just really tough to do,” Kamarck added.

Even as she has been a team player and will share responsibility, it is unclear how much actual influence Harris has wielded with Biden, who has spent decades engaged in foreign policy debates and is surrounded by a small cadre of loyalists.

When Biden returned to Camp David after Monday’s speech, in which he sought to accept responsibility for the withdrawal but not the chaotic exit, he was accompanied by Steve Ricchetti, one of a handful of confidants the president is known to lean on most heavily as a sounding board.

Harris, who declined an interview request, leaves Friday for her second foreign trip as vice president — to Singapore and Vietnam. Her first trip, to Guatemala and Mexico, was marred by an interview with NBC News in which she gave a flip answer about her reluctance to travel to the U.S.-Mexico border to address the migration increase. Advisors said she will remain engaged in the Afghanistan response while in Southeast Asia.

Unlike Biden, Harris does not have a long or deep history with Afghanistan, although as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee from 2017 to 2021 she would have had access to classified information about the country unavailable to Biden, then a private citizen. As a senator, she spoke infrequently about the conflict and traveled to the country just once, at the end of 2018, while she was preparing to run for president.

She did not mention the issue in her 2019 memoir, nor include it in her presidential campaign stump speech.

The vice president has expressed a general skepticism of lengthy foreign engagements that may have been inculcated when, as a girl in Berkeley, she saw her mother march in anti-Vietnam War protests. A former aide said Harris was struck during her trip to Afghanistan by the number of military personnel she met who were on their fourth or fifth tours and who recounted long periods away from their families.

An advisor who would not agree to be quoted by name pointed to Biden’s statement Monday that the buck stops with him but also said Harris is “100% all in.”

“She hasn’t shied away from this,” the advisor added.

Neither Harris nor administration officials would say what, if any, questions, concerns or reservations Harris raised about the withdrawal plans or the fate of thousands of Afghans who aided U.S. forces. It is also unknown whether she expressed any skepticism about intelligence assessments that a Taliban victory was more than a year away.

Even though the speed of the Taliban’s takeover caught them by surprise, White House officials have generally defended the administration’s planning, insisting in interviews Tuesday that they were prepared for all contingencies and positioned military forces to quickly evacuate Americans.

And although the withdrawal has been tumultuous and the toll on the Afghan people will probably be costly, Americans have long favored ending the conflict, and Biden and Harris may end up benefiting politically from the decision to withdraw.

Harris said during the 2020 primary that she supported a pullout from Afghanistan, and she voted for an unsuccessful 2017 effort in the Senate that would have rescinded the 2001 authorization to use force throughout the region.