Biden administration blames Donald Trump for chaotic Afghan withdrawal | World News

president joe bidenThe U.S. government on Thursday blamed his predecessor, President Donald Trump, for the deadly and chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021, leading to some of the darkest hours of Biden’s presidency.

The White House publicly released a 12-page summary summarizing the so-called “hot water” results of U.S. policy around ending the country’s longest war, taking little responsibility for its own actions and claiming that Biden was “imposed by the U.S.” severely constrained.” Trump’s decision.

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It acknowledged that the withdrawal of Americans and allies from Afghanistan should have started sooner, but blamed the delay on the Afghan government and military, as well as on assessments by the U.S. military and intelligence community.

The short document was drafted by the National Security Council, not a separate entity, and Biden himself provided input. The administration said the detailed reviews conducted by the State Department and the Pentagon were highly classified and would not be released publicly, and the White House said they would be forwarded privately to Congress on Thursday.

“President Biden’s options on how to execute the withdrawal from Afghanistan are severely limited by the conditions created by his predecessor,” the White House summary noted, noting that when Biden took office, “the Taliban were in the strongest military position they have ever been in since Controlled or contested nearly half of the country’s territory since 2001.”

The report did accuse the intelligence community of being overly optimistic in its assessment of the Afghan military’s willingness to fight, and said Biden followed the advice of military commanders on the pace of U.S. drawdowns.

“Clearly we didn’t do it right,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Thursday, but dodged questions about whether Biden regretted his decisions and actions that led to the withdrawal.

Kirby said of the report that “it’s not about accountability” but about “understanding” what happened in order to inform future decision-making.

The White House has claimed that mistakes in Afghanistan affected its handling of Ukraine, and the Biden administration has been credited with supporting Kiev against a Russian invasion. The White House said it modeled a worst-case scenario leading up to the February 2022 invasion and released intelligence on Moscow’s intentions months in advance.

“Our priority now is to evacuate as early as possible should the security situation deteriorate,” the White House said.

Apparently, in defense of its national security decisions, the Biden administration also noted that it issued the pre-war warning amid “strong opposition from senior Ukrainian government officials.”

Congressional Republicans have sharply criticized the Afghan troop withdrawal, focusing on a suicide bombing at Kabul airport that killed 13 service members and more than 100 other Afghans.

Former Marine Corps Sergeant. Tyler Vargas-Andrews, who was seriously injured in the blast, told a congressional hearing last month that the withdrawal “was a disaster” and that “the lack of accountability is inexcusable”.

The government report appeared to place the blame for the Aug. 26, 2021, suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport, citing a potentially pivotal decision by the US military.

“In response to the potential threat of a terrorist attack, the President repeatedly asked the military whether additional support would be required to carry out their mission at Hong Kong International Airport,” the report added, “Senior military officials confirmed that they had sufficient resources and authority to mitigate the threat .”

Kirby praised the Syrian army for carrying out the largest non-combatant airborne operation in history during the chaotic period of the fall of Kabul.

“They ended our nation’s longest war,” he told reporters. “It will never be easy. As the president himself has said, it will never be low-grade, low-risk or low-cost.”

Since the U.S. withdrawal, Biden has blamed the deal Trump struck with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, in February 2020, saying it restricted U.S. departures from the country. The deal gave the Taliban significant legitimacy and was accused by analysts of undermining a U.S.-backed government that would quickly collapse a year later.

The Afghan government has released some 5,000 Taliban prisoners following the Doha agreement as a condition of peace talks with the Taliban. Kirby pointed to the release and what he said were other examples of a “pervasive sense of degradation and neglect” that Biden inherited.

But the agreement also gave the U.S. the right to withdraw from the deal if peace talks in Afghanistan failed — and they did.

The agreement calls for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops by May 1, 2021. Biden delayed the full withdrawal until September, but refused to delay it further, saying it would prolong a war that long needed to end.

Since the withdrawal, the United States has conducted a successful operation that killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri – the group’s second-in-command in the September 11 attacks – which the White House sees as proof It still deters terrorist groups in Afghanistan.

But images of chaos and violence during the fall of Kabul still reverberate, including scenes of Afghans falling from the landing gear of U.S. planes, Afghan families handing babies to airport gates to protect them from the crushing and violence of crowds, and the aftermath. A suicide bomb attack that destroyed the gates of the monastery.

A February report by the U.S. government’s special inspector for Afghanistan placed the most immediate responsibility for the collapse of the Afghan military on the Trump and Biden administrations, citing the pace at which Biden insisted on withdrawing troops: “Due to (Afghan security forces’) The decision to withdraw all U.S. personnel and drastically reduce U.S. support to (Afghan security forces) destroyed the morale of Afghan soldiers and police.”

Pressed by reporters on Thursday afternoon, Kirby repeatedly defended the U.S. response and efforts to repatriate U.S. citizens and sparred with reporters who called the repatriation a mess. At one point, he paused, as if trying to contain his emotions.

“For all this talk of chaos, I just didn’t see it, not from my position,” said Kirby, who served as a Pentagon spokesman during the evacuation. “At one point during the evacuation, a plane full of Americans and Afghans took off every 48 minutes without missing a single mission. So I’m sorry, I just won’t buy the whole messy argument.”

Kirby said Biden would not declassify parts of the report on his own, noting ongoing work by the bipartisan Afghan War Commission and the sensitivity of the document.

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The release of the NSC review comes as State Department and House Republicans battle over classified cable documents related to the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. Last week, Rep. Mike McCall, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, took the unprecedented step of subpoenaing Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to write a cable to dozens of diplomats at the U.S. embassy in Kabul shortly before the withdrawal.

The July 2021 communication reportedly warned Brinken of the possible fall of Kabul through a special “dissent channel” that allows State Department officials to issue warnings or express contrary views directly to senior agency officials.