The Biden administration blames TRUMP for the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan
Biden administration blames TRUMP for disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan: New Pentagon report says president was ‘severely constrained by his predecessor’ and dismisses his talks with the Taliban
The White House released its congressional requested post-mortem of the withdrawal from Afghanistan on Thursday in a report that heavily blamed the Trump administration for the chaos.
“President Biden’s choices for executing a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by the conditions created by his predecessor,” the White House report said.
It then gave other reasons for backing out, including “America’s goal was never to build nations” and saying the US presence there had “unclear objectives and no end in sight.”
The document states that when Donald Trump took office in 2017, there were 10,000 troops in Afghanistan. Trump had pulled troops from 8,600 in June 2020 to 4,500 in September 2020 to the remaining 2,500 when he left office.
President Trump has ordered direct talks with the Taliban without consulting our allies and partners or allowing the Afghan government to the negotiating table. In September 2019, President Trump encouraged the Taliban by publicly considering inviting them to Camp David on the anniversary of 9/11.”
The document said the Biden White House was implementing a Trump White House order to withdraw troops by summer 2021, but claimed the Trump team had left them with “no plans” for how the withdrawal of the last 2,500 surviving troops had to be executed.
Trump had made an agreement to withdraw the troops by May 2021, but Biden promised to have them by September. The document said that Biden had to implement the withdrawal that Trump had agreed to or Taliban attacks on US troops would begin.
The document also blamed Trump for the backlog in Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) processing, saying that the previous administration’s “contempt and even hostility toward our commitment to Afghan allies” resulted in some 18,000 waiting for the processing their visa. It said Trump had “virtually stopped” SIV interviews despite making plans for withdrawal.