– White House Review Blames Botched Afghan Withdrawal Entirely On Trump:
Curiously just within a couple weeks after former President Trump kicked off his 2024 campaign by blasting the Biden administration’s botched and disastrous Afghan withdrawal, the Biden White House has released a report blaming it all on the prior Trump administration.
Despite Biden as commander-in-chief and his appointed officials being at the helm making every decision during the August 2021 withdrawal which saw the deaths of 13 US service members by a suicide bomber, the report puts it all on Trump.
The official administration review spells out that “President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor.” In both the report and a press conference by NSC spokesman John Kirby, the administration is basically not owning up to a thing…
VOA's @pwidakuswara: "How is the Trump administration responsible for the disorganized and chaotic process of the evacuation and determining…who gets to board the evacuation flights?"
Kirby: "I'm not going to beyond…the document…Those first few days were very, very tough." pic.twitter.com/pYO1KXmVSh
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 6, 2023
“The 12-page report by the National Security Council summarizes the administration’s assessment of the withdrawal and largely blamed former President Donald Trump’s administration for the chaos that unfolded as U.S. troops were leaving and as Americans and Afghans evacuated from the country. The Taliban took over the country’s government and have remained in power,” NBC writes of the Thursday issuance of the report.
Lawmakers are expected to be handed a longer briefing compiled by the Pentagon and State Department, but with classified material contained in it.
The report further blames Trump for setting a target date for withdrawal, largely through the Doha negotiation process, but while providing “no plan for executing it.” The administration and the media is now actually managing to throw “election denial” into the list of reasons why things went so badly in the Afghan pullout:
The White House said that the lack of communication from the Trump administration underscores why effective coordination for the transition process is critical “especially when it comes to complex military operations,” the summary stated. Fueled by Trump’s false claims that he had been denied re-election by rampant fraud, his administration largely refused to conduct traditional transition communications ahead of Biden taking office.
“No agency predicted a Taliban takeover in nine days,” Kirby told reporters at the White House press briefing. “No agency predicted the rapid fleeing of President [Ashraf] Ghani who had indicated to us his intent to remain in Afghanistan up until he departed on the 15th of August, and no agency predicted that the more than 300,000 trained and equipped Afghan National Security Defense Forces would fail to fight for their country, especially after 20 years of American support.”
“Transitions matter. That’s the first lesson learned here. And the incoming administration wasn’t much of one,” Kirby additionally said. “Thus, President Biden’s choice was stark: either withdrawal of our forces or resume fighting with the Taliban. He chose the former.”
Indeed during Kirby’s lengthy presser which blamed the Trump administration for all major failures, again despite it literally being the Biden White House which ordered and oversaw the hasty pullout, there was much external finger-pointing but nothing which President Biden could own up to, conveniently enough. And the claim that no US agency predicted the rapid Taliban takeover is unverifiable given the information is classified, and because of this the intel community can’t so much as defend itself.
“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,” the White House report reads. “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.”
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