Do you know how many would have died if they withdrew on Trump's watch? No because Trump didn't get us out. Of course we didn't do it to your liking.
President Joe Biden’s administration is laying the blame on his predecessor, President Donald Trump, for the deadly and chaotic 2021 withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan that brought about some of the darkest moments of Biden’s presidency. The White House publicly released a 12-page...
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The report does fault overly optimistic
intelligence community assessments about the Afghan army’s willingness to fight, and says Biden followed military commanders’ recommendations for the pacing of the drawdown of U.S. forces.
“To manage the potential threat of a terrorist attack, the President repeatedly asked whether the military required additional support to carry out their mission at HKIA,” the report said, adding, “Senior military officials confirmed that they had sufficient resources and authorities to mitigate threats.”
“They ended our nation’s longest war,” he told reporters. “That was never going to be an easy thing to do. And as the president himself has said, it was never going to be low grade or low risk or low cost.”
Since the U.S. withdrawal, Biden has blamed the February 2020 agreement Trump reached with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, saying it boxed the U.S. into leaving the country. The agreement has been blamed by analysts for undercutting the U.S.-backed government, which collapsed the following year.
Under the U.S.-Taliban Doha agreement, roughly 5,000 Taliban prisoners were released as a condition for what were supposed to be separate future peace talks between the Kabul government and the Taliban. Kirby noted that release and other examples of what he said was a “general sense of degradation and neglect” inherited by Biden.
But the agreement also left an opening for the
U.S. to call off its withdrawal deal with the Taliban if the promised Taliban-Afghan peace talks failed — which they did under Biden, as the U.S. military was pulling out and Taliban fighters advancing.
The U.S. was to remove all forces by May 1, 2021. Biden pushed a full withdrawal to September but declined to delay further, saying it would prolong a war that had long needed to end.
Since the withdrawal, the U.S. carried out a successful operation to kill al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri — the group’s No. 2 leader during the Sept. 11 attacks — which the White House has argued is proof it can still deter terrorist groups in Afghanistan.
But the images of disorder and violence during the fall of Kabul still reverberate, including scenes of Afghans falling from the undercarriages of American planes, Afghan families handing infants over airport gates to save them from the crush and violence of the crowd, and the devastation after the suicide bombing at the Abbey Gate.
A February report by the U.S. government’s special inspector general for Afghanistan placed the most immediate blame for the Afghan military’s collapse on both the Trump and Biden administrations: “Due to the (Afghan security force’s) dependency on U.S. military forces, the decision to withdraw all U.S. military personnel and dramatically reduce U.S. support to the (Afghan security forces) destroyed the morale of Afghan soldiers and police.”
Pressed by reporters Thursday afternoon, Kirby repeatedly defended the U.S. response and effort to evacuate American citizens and argued with reporters who referred to the withdrawal as chaotic. At one point, he paused in what appeared to be an effort to gather his emotions.
“For all this talk of chaos, I just didn’t see it, not from my perch,” said Kirby, who was the Pentagon spokesman during the withdrawal. “At one point during the evacuation, there was an aircraft taking off full of people, Americans and Afghans alike, every 48 minutes, and not one single mission was missed. So I’m sorry, I just won’t buy the whole argument of chaos.”
