President Joe Biden on Tuesday said the troop withdrawal from Kabul that left 13 US service members dead was an ‘extraordinary success’ and blamed Donald Trump and local soldiers for the mess in Afghanistan and the Taliban takeover.
A defiant Biden said the operation couldn’t have been done in a ‘more orderly manner’ and ‘respectfully disagreed’ with critics who said he should have started the evacuation sooner to avoid the chaos.
The president also hailed the 120,000 people they have gotten to safety in ‘one of the biggest airlifts in history’, vowed to keep working to get Afghan allies out and said the State Department had reached out to stranded Americans 19 times since March asking if they wanted to leave.
Biden spoke passionately as he defended his actions, at times waving his arms and gripping the podium, amid intense criticism from Democrats, many Republicans and fellow world leaders about his handling of the U.S. drawdown.
Eleven Marines, a Special Forces member and a Navy Corpsman were all killed in the ISIS-K suicide attack last Thursday as US forces frantically tried to get people on evacuation flights before the August 31 deadline.
Thousands of local allies and at least 100 U.S. citizens are still stuck and facing threats from the Taliban. Afghans desperate to leave ran after US planes on the tarmac and two fell out of the skies to their deaths in a bid to escape the rule of the insurgents.
In the lengthy remarks, where he refused to take shouted questions from reporters, Biden argued the world was changing and brought up his late son Beau, an Iraq War veteran who died of brain cancer. He cited cyber threats from Russia and China as among the modern concerns America must face.
‘Let me be clear. Leaving August 31 is not due to an arbitrary deadline. It was designed to save American lives,’ Biden said in his first public remarks since the final US soldier left Hamid Karzai International Airport on Monday night.
The Taliban celebrated the American withdraw by hosting mock funerals with coffins draped with the US, UK and French flags as well as NATO’s insignia. They launched fireworks into the Kabul skyline and flaunted the American weapons and equipment they obtained that U.S. military personnel left behind.
August 31 was the deadline Biden set earlier this year and stuck to despite pleas from some Democratic lawmakers who were veterans and his fellow world leaders, who used a G7 virtual meeting to plead with him to keep boots on the ground longer.
But Biden argued Trump, his predecessor in the Oval Office, tied his hands on the matter. He noted Trump signed a deal with the Taliban to leave by May 1 and that shackled his options.
‘My predecessor, the former president, signed an agreement with the Taliban to remove U.S. troops by May 1, just months after I was inaugurated,’ he said.
He said that agreement allowed the release of 5,000 prisoners last year. ‘including some of the Taliban’s top war commanders among…
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