The Cradle : Biden skirts responsibility for botched Afghanistan pullout, blames Trump instead

 Biden skirts responsibility for botched Afghanistan pullout, blames Trump instead

The White House says Biden, who oversaw the disastrous withdrawal of US troops in August 2021, bears only a 'dint' of responsibility for the chaos that engulfed Kabul

By

News Desk

- April 07 2023

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(Photo credit: DOUG MILLS/The New York Times/Redux)

The White House has blamed the government of former president Donald Trump for the chaos and violence that erupted during the botched withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in 2021.

“President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor,” a 12-page report released by the White House on 6 April reads.

“There were no signs that more time, more funds, or more Americans at risk in Afghanistan would have yielded a fundamentally different trajectory,” the summary states, in defense of Biden’s handling of the withdrawal of US troops.

The document also criticizes Trump’s negotiations with the Taliban and the signing of the Doha Agreement in 2020, which officially started the process to end Washington’s longest-ever war. It then accuses the Trump White House of providing “no plans for how to conduct the final withdrawal or to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies.”

However, the report later acknowledges that White House officials failed to account for “psychological factors” within the US-trained Afghan army, which disintegrated with little to no resistance in the face of advancing Taliban forces.

“No agency predicted a Taliban takeover in nine days,” National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on Thursday. “And no agency predicted that the more than 300,000 trained and equipped Afghan national defense forces would fail to fight for their country, especially after 20 years of American support.”

When asked by reporters about who will be held accountable for the complete mishandling of the situation in Afghanistan, Kirby said: “This document and this effort isn’t about accountability today, it’s about understanding … Nobody’s saying that everything was perfect, but there’s a lot that went right.”

Pressed on whether Biden bears any responsibility for the chaos that embroiled Kabul airport during the withdrawal, Kirby replied, “Just by dint as the commander in chief, he assumed responsibility for the orders he gives.”

Over a year and a half ago, Washington completed the withdrawal of US troops and personnel from the Afghan capital Kabul. Images of crowds storming parked planes, climbing atop aircraft, and even clinging to a departing US military cargo plane as it rolled down the runway of Hamid Karzai International Airport were aired around the world, sending Biden’s approval ratings plummeting.

Last year, the US Air Force cleared the crew of the C-17 cargo plane of any responsibility for taking off with desperate civilians hanging onto the wings and undercarriage.

US troops were also cleared of responsibility for a drone strike that killed an entire family in Kabul, including seven children, and for a massacre outside Kabul airport during the last days of the withdrawal, when US and NATO troops killed well over 150 Afghan civilians after an ISIS suicide bomber blew himself up.

The release of the White House report on Thursday comes just weeks after the US House of Representatives House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) subpoenaed the State Department to release a ‘dissent cable‘ that was signed by 23 staffers from the US embassy in Kabul in July 2021, in which they warned that the defeat of the US-trained Afghan army by the Taliban was “imminent.”

Nearly 50,000 civilians were killed during the 20 years of occupation and war. Thousands of Afghan refugees remain stranded in refugee camps waiting to receive humanitarian visas to enter the US.

The Cradle