Trump once again ranted and raved about Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan being the worst decision a president has ever made in his press conference yesterday. He is, as always, completely full of it.
Sen. Chris Murphy tweeted the facts:
Lost amidst Trump’s rambling incoherence about Afghanistan today is the fact that he negotiated the withdrawal of U.S. forces with the Taliban, not Biden.
Here are the facts about how Biden was handed a giant mess from Trump in Afghanistan.
Trump made a deal with the Taliban to completely withdraw U.S. forces by May 1, 2021. When Biden took office, he negotiated a short extension for full withdrawal to August 2021, but he could not alter the fundamental terms of the agreement.
Trump had boxed Biden in. If Biden reneged on that agreement, Taliban attacks on American servicemembers would have restarted, forcing us to send thousands more troops back into the conflict. Very few Americans would have supported this endless commitment.
The reality is that U.S. military intervention was never going to be successful in standing up an American-style democracy and an American-style military in Afghanistan. 20 years and more than $2 trillion dollars trying to achieve it was enough.
Then as our troop departure – negotiated by Trump – drew closer, the Afghan government and military collapsed without warning. It is not plausible to hold Biden responsible for that. That was a decision made by panicked Afghan leaders.
That collapse would have happened whether Trump or Biden was President. Frankly, Biden performed admirably under the circumstances, organizing the largest post war non-combatent evacuation in our nation’s history.
Trump set in motion the withdrawal in a way that Biden could not reverse. It’s just not true Trump would have managed the withdrawal better. Undoubtedly he would have handled it like he handled every other crisis – disastrously
Murphy is too polite to note that the media (I’m looking at you, Tapper) played a huge part in pushing Trump’s disinformation with their hand wringing over the withdrawal as if both Trump and Biden had never promised to do it (Biden being the only one to actually fulfill it) and suddenly deciding that it was the wrong thing to do. Their breathless reporting was journalistic malpractice and it gave Trump the ability to use it as a cudgel against Biden when it was his incompetence that caused it. Unforgivable.