Biden slammed for trying to shift blame to Trump over botched Afghanistan withdrawal

WASHINGTON – A White House report on the botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan faulted Donald Trump for leaving President Joe Biden few options – a finding that House Foreign Affairs chair Michael McCaul slammed as a “disgraceful” effort to shift blame.

The National Security Council released a 12-page summary of the after-action report on Thursday, after submitting a far more detailed classified version to Congress.

The report amounts to a blistering assessment of Trump’s handling of Afghanistan, tempered with acknowledgements of intelligence failures.

White House national security spokesman John Kirby asserted that Trump bequeathed to Biden a situation of “degradation and neglect,” though he conceded the current administration didn’t foresee the overnight collapse of the U.S.-backed government.

“Whatever plans there might have been done by the previous administration, we didn’t see. And it was not apparent that there was a lot of planning done,” Kirby said. “I don’t think he can be blamed for that.”

Trump and other Republicans hammered Biden for trying to wriggle out of accountability.

“This administration’s brazen whitewashing of their failure in Afghanistan is disgraceful, unjust, and flat-out insulting,” McCaul, an Austin Republican, said from Taiwan, where he was leading a congressional fact-finding mission. “President Biden made the decision to withdraw and even picked the exact date. He is responsible for the massive failures in planning and execution.”

He called on Biden to declassify as much of the report as possible, to let the public judge “why the withdrawal was such a disaster.”

In the final rush to evacuate Americans from Kabul, a suicide bomber killed 13 people from the U.S. military and as many as 170 civilians. The chaos included the horrific sight of would-be refugees falling from the wings of a cargo plane.

“The President’s decision to end the war in Afghanistan was the right one. The United States had long ago accomplished its mission to remove from the battlefield the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 and to degrade the terrorist threat to the United States from Afghanistan,” Kirby said.

But he said, “Clearly, we didn’t get things right here with Afghanistan about how fast the Taliban were moving across the country.”

The White House report asserts that Trump “emboldened the Taliban” in September 2019 by floating the possibility of an invitation to Camp David on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks – a plot hatched by their al Qaeda allies.

“President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor,” the report says.

“When President Trump took office in 2017, there were more than 10,000 troops in Afghanistan. Eighteen months later, after introducing more than 3,000 additional troops just to maintain the stalemate, President Trump ordered direct talks with the Taliban without consulting with our allies and partners or allowing the Afghan government at the negotiating table.”

The Trump campaign rejected the finger-pointing.

The Biden administration is “trying to gaslight the American people for their disastrous withdrawal in Afghanistan that directly led to American deaths and emboldened the terrorists,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s re-election effort, told the Daily Caller. “The world has become a more dangerous place under Joe Biden.”

McCaul became Foreign Affairs chairman in January with the new House GOP majority. One of his first orders of business was to hold a hearing on the wthdrawal from Afghanistan a month ago.

Biden campaigned on a vow to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, ending the longest war in American history. On July 8, 2021, he declared that would occur by Aug. 31. The U.S. backed government collapsed within a month.

At the White House, Kirby pointed repeatedly to the Doha Agreement — signed 11 months before Biden took office. The deal between the Taliban and the Trump administration set May 2021 as the deadline to end the U.S. military presence.

“Do not underestimate the effect that the Doha Agreement had on the morale and the willingness to fight on the Afghan national security and defense forces. It had a very corrosive effect,” Kirby said.

The White House review, based partly on after-action reports from the Pentagon and State Department, also focuses on Doha.

“As part of the deal, President Trump also pressured the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban fighters from prison, including senior war commanders, without securing the release of the only American hostage known to be held by the Taliban,” the report says.

“Over his last 11 months in office, President Trump ordered a series of drawdowns of U.S. troops. By June 2020, President Trump reduced U.S. troops in Afghanistan to 8,600. In September 2020, he directed a further draw down to 4,500. A month later, President Trump tweeted, to the surprise of military advisors, that the remaining U.S. troops in Afghanistan should be `home by Christmas!’”

And, he said, Trump “all but froze” the special visa program devised to help Afghan allies escape retaliation once their U.S. protectors were gone.

A July 2021 “dissent cable” – a formal mechanism for diplomats to express contrarian views — warned that Kabul would quickly collapse once the U.S. military was gone.

McCaul has subpoenaed the State Department for the document.

According to Politico, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told aides Thursday that he would not release that document to Congress, because doing so would make internal candor less likely in the future.

Kirby said the challenges were much harder than necessary because Trump – who refused to concede the 2016 election – blocked aides from sharing information.

“The transition team of the incoming administration asked repeatedly to see plans for withdrawal,” Kirby told reporters. “We were almost starting from scratch. There was no visibility into what they had done.”

Kirby rejected contentions, often aired by Trump, that the U.S. abandoned to the Taliban $7 billion worth of equipment, including state of the art weaponry. Anything left behind, he said, had been transferred to the Afghan military, which evaporated when the U.S. withdrew.

“So, it is the Afghans who were responsible for the turnover of all that equipment” to the Taliban, Kirby said.