Biden Admin Blames Trump For Biden’s Botched Afghanistan Exit

Biden Admin Blames Trump For Biden’s Botched Afghanistan Exit

The White House document supposedly “outlining the key decisions and challenges” concerning the withdrawal from Afghanistan is nothing but a TDS document.

The 12-page document mentions Trump 14 times. The Biden administration blames the disastrous withdrawal on Trump and the Afghan military and government.

It reminds me of a Seinfeld episode when George ruins Jerry’s car. Elaine runs up to Jerry’s apartment, makes it sound like crazy kids tried to go after them, and then drops the bomb that George hit a pothole, and the car now makes a bad sound.

But it doesn’t faze Jerry because thank goodness, his friends are okay!

The White House pulled an Elaine with the first three paragraphs. Make it seem like Trump set up a horrible situation for Biden so that no matter what he did, it would be an awful withdrawal:

President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor. When President Trump took office in 2017, there were more than 10,000 troops in Afghanistan. Eighteen months later, after introducing more than 3,000 additional troops just to maintain the stalemate, President Trump ordered direct talks with the Taliban without consulting with our allies and partners or allowing the Afghan government at the negotiating table. In September 2019, President Trump embolded the Taliban by publicly considering inviting them to Camp David on the anniversary of 9/11. In February 2020, the United States and the Taliban reached a deal, known as the Doha Agreement, under which the United States agreed to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by May 2021. In return, the Taliban agreed to participate in a peace process and refrain from attacking U.S. troops and threatening Afghanistan’s major cities—but only as long as the United States remained committed to withdraw by the agreement’s deadline. As part of the deal, President Trump also pressured the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban fighters from prison, including senior war commanders, without securing the release of the only American hostage known to be held by the Taliban.

Over his last 11 months in office, President Trump ordered a series of drawdowns of U.S. troops. By June 2020, President Trump reduced U.S. troops in Afghanistan to 8,600. In September 2020, he directed a further draw down to 4,500. A month later, President Trump tweeted, to the surprise of military advisors, that the remaining U.S. troops in Afghanistan should be “home by Christmas!” On September 28, 2021, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Milley testified that, on November 11, he had received an unclassified signed order directing the U.S. military to withdraw all forces from Afghanistan no later than January 15, 2021. One week later, that order was rescinded and replaced with one to draw down to 2,500 troops by the same date. During the transition from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration, the outgoing Administration provided no plans for how to conduct the final withdrawal or to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies. Indeed, there were no such plans in place when President Biden came into office, even with the agreed upon full withdrawal just over three months away.

Those two paragraphs go against National Security Council spokesman John Kirby claimed in a press conference: “Peter, the purpose of the document that we’re putting out today is to sort of create the chief views and findings of the agencies that did after-action reviews. It’s not — the purpose of it is not accountability. The purpose of it is — the purposes of it is to study lesson learned.”

Kirby said, “Transitions matter. That’s the first lesson learned here. And the incoming administration wasn’t much of one. Thus, President Biden’s choice was stark: either withdrawal of our forces or resume fighting with the Taliban. He chose the former.”

Let me get this straight. The withdrawal happened in August 2021. The Biden administration insisted it had to do something because the Taliban would have returned to war with America if the troops hadn’t withdrawn by May 2021.

So if Trump messed up that bad, why go ahead with the withdrawal?

Want even more confusion? Kirby claimed, “For all this talk of chaos, I didn’t see it from my perch. I just don’t buy the whole argument of chaos.”

Kirby admitted it wasn’t perfect, but “a lot went right.”

If there was no chaos and so much went right, then why go on and on about how terrible Trump did with Afghanistan and left a mess for Biden?

Thirteen American soldiers and 200 Afghan civilians were killed when a terrorist attacked the Hamid Karzai International Airport’s Abbey Gate.

The attack received a small blip in the document despite the section about the evacuation taking over a page and a half. The rest of the section about the airport and the gate bragged about how the administration reinforced security and the military killed two terrorists.

As the document continues, to soften the blow, whoever wrote it lavishes praise on the administration’s response to…Ukraine.

I’m not kidding:

Ultimately, the Administration made a decision to engage in unprecedented extensive targeted outreach to Americans and Afghan partners about the risk of collapse, including numerous security alerts and tens of thousands of direct phone calls and messages to U.S. citizens in particular to leave Afghanistan, but to not broadcast loudly and publicly about a potential worst-case scenario unfolding in order to avoid signaling a lack of confidence in the ANDSF or the Afghan government’s position. This calculus was made based on the prevailing intelligence and military view throughout the early weeks of August that Kabul would hold beyond the end of the withdrawal. As Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines stated on August 18, 2021, “[the collapse] unfolded more quickly than [the Intelligence Community] anticipated.” In fact, the collapse was more rapid than either the Taliban or the Afghan government expected.

In a destabilizing security environment, we now err on the side of aggressive communication about risks. We did this in advance of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Months before the invasion, we proactively released intelligence with trusted partners. That engagement broadened—and grew louder and more public—in the weeks leading up to Russia’s invasion. This approach met strong objections from senior officials in the Ukrainian government who were concerned such warnings would spark panic and precipitate capital flight, damaging the Ukrainian economy. However, our clear and unvarnished warnings enabled the United States to take advantage of a critical window before the invasion to organize with our allies, plan the swift execution of our response, and enable Americans in Ukraine to depart safely.

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