Trump Blamed For The Chaotic Withdrawal Of US Troops From Afghanistan

The administration of President Joe Biden has attributed the violent and disorderly withdrawal of US soldiers from Afghanistan in 2021 to his predecessor, Donald Trump.

The White House said that Mr. Biden was “severely restricted” by Mr. Trump’s actions in a 12-page assessment of the outcomes of the so-called “hotwash” of American policies around the end of the country’s longest conflict.

However, it places the blame for the delays on the Afghan government and military as well as on US military and intelligence community assessments. It does acknowledge that the evacuation of Americans and allies from Afghanistan should have begun sooner.

Instead of being created independently, the brief memo was created by the National Security Council with involvement from Vice President Biden.

The administration claimed that the State Department’s and the Pentagon’s in-depth analyses, which the White House claimed will be delivered to Congress in private on Thursday, were highly classified and would not be made public.

The White House summary notes that when Mr. Biden took office, “the Taliban were in the strongest military position that they had been in since 2001, controlling or contesting nearly half of the country,” adding that “President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor.”

In his response, Mr. Trump charged that the Biden administration was engaging in “a new disinformation game” to draw attention away from “their grotesque SURRENDER in Afghanistan.” He wrote on his social media page, “Biden is accountable, no one else.

The study criticizes excessively optimistic intelligence community evaluations of the Afghan army’s combat readiness and notes that Mr. Biden complied with military commanders’ advice regarding the rate of US force withdrawal.

John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said on Thursday that “clearly we didn’t get it right,” but avoided queries about whether Mr. Biden has any regrets about the choices and deeds he took that resulted in the pullout.

The report’s “goal is not accountability,” according to Mr. Kirby, but rather “understanding” what occurred in order to guide decision-making in the future. The Biden administration is credited with helping Kyiv defend itself against Russia’s invasion, and the White House claims that mistakes made in Afghanistan guided its handling of the situation in Ukraine.

Before the February 2022 invasion, the White House claims it ran worst-case scenarios and tried to make intelligence about Moscow’s plans public months in advance.

When faced with a deteriorating security scenario, “we now prioritize earlier evacuations,” the White House said.

The Biden administration also mentions that it provided pre-war warnings over “significant protests from senior officials in the Ukrainian government” in an apparent attempt to defend its national security decision-making.

Republicans in Congress have harshly criticized the pullout from Afghanistan, highlighting the deaths of 13 service personnel in a suicide bombing that also left more than 100 Afghans dead at Kabul’s airport.

The report was hailed as an “essential next step” by Shawn Vandiver, a Navy veteran and the brainchild behind the #AfghanEvac initiative to resettle Afghan refugees.