Biden Ducks Accountability While America Grows Weaker

Americans desperately needed clear resolve and leadership out of Washington last week – but once again, President Joe Biden let us down.

• Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have ensured the relationship between China and Russia is closer than ever before.
• French President Emmanuel Macron, whose country is supposedly a major U.S. ally, traveled to Beijing and paid lip service to Xi and his cronies, stressing the need for Europe to have “strategic autonomy” in its dealings with China and the U.S., despite the massive military aid America provides to Europe and his own country.
• A disastrous intelligence leak that may have exposed sensitive information concerning not only American operations, but also that of our allies’, did little to help matters.

This was a time when Biden should have stood up for the things we need to do to keep America safe and prosperous.  Unfortunately, Biden instead released a ridiculous, fantastical report that disingenuously blamed the Trump Administration for his own Administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

First, the facts: In our negotiations with the Taliban, the Trump Administration successfully established a model of deterrence that kept Americans safe.  We knew the American people wanted our soldiers to come home, and we also knew this objective would only be achievable if the Taliban understood there would be swift and harsh consequences if it threatened our people.  That’s why our withdrawal plan was conditions-based, and it’s why from the beginning of our negotiations in early 2020 until the day we left office, not one single American was killed by the Taliban.  We drew clear lines, and the Taliban understood that it was dealing with an American Administration that would enforce those lines.

All of this changed when Biden took over. He ripped up our conditions-based withdrawal plan and decided to leave unconditionally, trusting the Taliban not to take advantage of the vacuum and trusting the Afghan military to operate effectively without the American-provided air support it was built to rely upon.  More foolish still, he trusted then-President Ashraf Ghani to actually stand and fight and lead his country, rather than turn tail and run.  We in the Trump Administration knew that Ghani was little more than a corrupt scoundrel who would flee the minute he was in danger, and we knew that abandoning Bagram Air Base, as the Biden Administration did early on in the debacle, would be catastrophic for the security of Americans and our partners in the country. These mistakes were avoidable, and the Biden Administration bears the blame for them.

Rather than acknowledge these errors, the Biden Administration made up its own “facts” and avoided any accountability whatsoever.  Its claim that the Trump Administration left an insufficient number of troops to maintain peace and deter the Taliban is simply not true – the clearest evidence being that we did just that before the Biden Administration took office.  The security situation deteriorated rapidly not because there was an inadequate U.S. military presence, but because the Biden Administration abandoned the model of deterrence we established.  The Administration’s messaging surrounding the report, too, has been absurd, with one spokesperson going so far as to claim he “just didn’t see” any chaos in the withdrawal, despite the terror attack that claimed 13 American lives, the Taliban posing on hastily abandoned American military equipment, and infamous footage of desperate Afghans clinging to the outside of American aircraft as they left Kabul airport.

Perhaps the most unbelievable line in the report, though, is this one: “[W]hen the President made the decision to leave Afghanistan, some worried that doing so could weaken our alliances or put the United States at a disadvantage on the global stage. The opposite has happened. Our standing around the world is significantly greater, as evidenced by multiple opinion surveys.”  (Unsurprisingly, the official White House report offers no link to these “surveys.”) This statement is alarming not only because it is clearly false, but also because it betrays a clear lack of understanding of how to keep America safe and defend our interests. Team Biden’s debacle in Afghanistan heralded the arrival of American weakness: Vladimir Putin watched our withdrawal and knew he had a green light to invade Ukraine, kidnap Americans and hold them hostage, and go after our pipelines here at home. Xi Jinping saw it and knew he could threaten Taiwan at will.  Biden’s botched withdrawal shamed America and emboldened our enemies.  To say otherwise is simply to ignore reality.

Biden’s grievous errors in judgment turned our withdrawal plan into a chaotic rush for the exit that cost 13 American soldiers their lives.  To issue this fatuous, self-serving report almost two years later in an effort to avoid accountability is a grave disservice to all the Americans who fought and served in Afghanistan.  Worse yet, it signals that the Biden Administration is unable to learn from its mistakes and is instead committed to following the same foolhardy path of weakness that has marked its tenure thus far.