In August 2021, President Joe Biden made the career-defining decision to end the War in Afghanistan, and he saw his public image take a hit during our military’s chaotic withdrawal, exemplified by viral photographs of Afghan allies rushing onto planes at the Kabul airport.
Not to worry, the Biden administration is here to say that the chaos wasn’t actually that bad… and that it was actually the fault of the previous president.
John Kirby — the coordinator for strategic communications at Biden’s National Security Council — discussed the withdrawal at a press conference Thursday.
Kirby blamed Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from the nation on “a general sense of degradation and neglect there that that the President inherited.”
He went on to slam the Doha Agreement, former President Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban that was ultimately executed by Biden.
“When President Trump took office, there was more than 10,000 American troops in Afghanistan. He took it down to 2,500,” Kirby said.
“He negotiated the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners that were being held by [the administration of Ashrahf Ghani, Afghanistan’s final president] without consultation with the Ghani government. He negotiated the Doha Agreement with the Taliban without the Ghani government in the room. And he all but froze the Special Immigrant Visa program, which had been providing opportunities for some of our Afghan allies to get out of the country and to come — and to come back.
Kirby also attributed the Afghan army’s low morale to Trump’s deal with the Taliban.
“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,” Kirby said, repeating the same assertion without actually proving it.
“It — it had — it had a very corrosive effect on their willingness to continue to fight for their country,”
Kirby also said that withdrawal wasn’t actually that chaotic.
“For all this talk of chaos, I just didn’t see it, not from my perch,” Kirby said.
“At one point during the evacuation, there was an aircraft taking off full of people, Americans and Afghans alike, every 48 minutes. And not one single mission was missed. So, I’m sorry, I just won’t buy the whole argument of chaos. It was tough in the first few hours. You would expect it to be. There was nobody at the airport and certainly no Americans. It took time to get in there.”
In Kirby’s view, there was no chaos, and if there were, then it would be Trump’s fault. According to Kirby, Trump is responsible for the chaos that didn’t actually occur.
Makes sense!
Watch the video here —
John Kirby on the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan:
"For all this talk of chaos, I just didn't see it!" pic.twitter.com/UYOkkZubq6
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 6, 2023
Analysts, US lawmakers and people around the world have been comparing the so-called fall of Saigon with the Taliban takeover of Kabul, but how does it compare?https://t.co/OyrqFDWhDy pic.twitter.com/ZU0poHK7wa
— BBC World Service (@bbcworldservice) August 17, 2021
Taliban members inspected damaged aircraft and equipment at Kabul airport after the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops https://t.co/u31jpeOmAF pic.twitter.com/gk8Ng6v7iJ
— Reuters (@Reuters) August 31, 2021
The Horn editorial team