The chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan should have happened sooner, the White House concedes, though it also places much of the blame for the mess on the Trump administration. After a two-year review, the National Security Council concluded "President Biden's choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor," including through his Doha Agreement with the Taliban, which left just 2,500 US troops in Afghanistan in August 2021. The Trump administration also left "no plans for how to conduct the final withdrawal or to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies," reads the document, which some Republicans are calling "disgraceful," per the Washington Post.
The Biden administration chose to delay the withdrawal until September, but "clearly, we didn't get things right," NSC spokesperson John Kirby said Thursday, referencing miscalculations in "how fast the Taliban were moving across the country" in early August and "how fast [Afghan security force commanders] were going to fold," per the Post. But he claimed the Doha Agreement had "a very corrosive effect" on the Afghan defense forces' "willingness to fight." He also said the Trump administration had left the Special Immigrant Visa program, which considered which helpful Afghans should be granted refuge in the US, "starved for resources." "It was a general sense of degradation and neglect there that the president inherited," Kirby said, per the New York Times.
While the report notes the administration has learned to "prioritize earlier evacuations when faced with a degrading security situation" and "err on the side of aggressive communication about risks," per ABC News, it fails to mention that Biden ignored recommendations to keep 2,500 forces in Afghanistan to prevent a Taliban takeover and struck a deal with the Taliban to allow for the evacuation of some 120,000 Americans and Afghans even as fighters were reportedly carrying out executions, per the Post. Rather than address "the substantial flaws in its decision-making process, the Biden administration has provided the public a full-throated and deeply partisan explanation of its indefensible Afghanistan policy," Republican Sen. Roger Wicker said, per the outlet.
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Donald Trump himself agrees. “These Morons in the White House, who are systematically destroying our Country, headed up by the biggest Moron of them all, Hopeless Joe Biden, have a new disinformation game they are playing—Blame ‘TRUMP’ for their grossly incompetent SURRENDER in Afghanistan,” the former president wrote on Truth Social, per the New York Post. "Biden is responsible, no one else!" (More Afghanistan stories.)
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