NY Post
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A topic most Americans thought was long since forgotten–the ill-fated Afghanistan withdrawal in August 2021–is back in the news.
On Thursday, the White House released its review of President Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan that left 13 servicemen and women dead.
In a 12-page report, Biden officials did what most of us might expect. They blamed former President Trump.
The report defends the decision to withdraw to which most Americans agree. It’s the manner in which it was done that bothers us.
The criticism that should point to Biden instead is targeted at Trump for “constraining the conditions of American evacuation.”
“President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor,” the document states.
There is an acknowledgment that the evacuation should have begun sooner but the blame for the delay is put on the Afghan government and military as well as the U.S. military and intelligence community.
“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 says.
“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.”
“As you all know, over these many months, departments and agencies key to the withdrawal conducted thorough internal after-action reviews, each of them examining their decision-making processes, as well as how those decisions were executed,” White House national security spokesman John Kirby said Thursday.
“Today, they are making those reviews available to relevant committees in the Senate and in the House, as previewed by Secretaries [Antony] Blinken and [Lloyd] Austin in testimony last month,” he added.
When Biden assumed office, the White House asserts that “the Taliban were in the strongest military position that they had been in since 2001, controlling or contesting nearly half of the country.”
“While it was always the president’s intent to end that war, it is also undeniable that decisions made and the lack of planning done by the previous administration significantly limited options available to him,” Kirby told reporters at a White House press briefing on Thursday.
“President Biden inherited a force presence in Afghanistan of some 2,500 troops. That was the lowest since 2001. He inherited a special immigrant visa program that had been starved of resources.
“And he inherited a deal struck between the previous administration and the Taliban that called for the complete removal of all U.S. troops by May of 2021, or else the Taliban, which had stopped its attacks while the deal was in place, would go back to war against the United States.”
Kirby alleges that the Trump administration did not provide any plans for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. No plans for the transition of security to the Afghan government. And no plans for special immigrant visas for Afghan allies.
He said that the first lesson to come out of the report is that transitions matter. Since there wasn’t much of one, Biden had two choices. Keep fighting or withdraw. He chose the latter.
