The elderly man with a dropped jaw gazed down at the ground and uttered falsehoods: When [Trump] was president, they were still killing people in Afghanistan and he didn’t do anything about that,” President Joe Biden rasped.
Our current president relinquished two decades of hard-earned American achievements in that arid, forsaken land. Afghanistan was handed over to the Taliban by Biden, along with $8 billion worth of equipment and $2 trillion in lost investments.
Was he under the impression that we had forgotten that the Afghanistan crisis occurred during his tenure? Despite being in office for less than three months, Biden insisted on the complete withdrawal of the meager 2,500 American troops from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021. It is worth noting that Biden had ten times the number of troops guarding Washington for his own inauguration.
Although he later tried to shift blame to former President Donald Trump for the Afghanistan catastrophe, it was Biden who issued the order, as evidenced in the Department of Defense archives. By publicly announcing our withdrawal date to the enemy, abandoning our most strategically important military bases, including Bagram Air Base, and disregarding the advice of his top military advisors, Biden transformed Operation Enduring Freedom into a lasting source of shame for the United States.
Biden’s evacuation from Kabul marked the most embarrassing American defeat since the British invasion of Washington and the burning of the White House, Capitol, and Navy Yard in August 1814. As is typical with defeats, this fiasco undermined American deterrence worldwide. The botched withdrawal from Afghanistan undoubtedly emboldened Vladimir Putin in his invasion of Ukraine six months later.
Biden then doubled-down, saying “The truth is, I’m the only president in this century… this decade… that [sic]doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world like [Trump] did,” he said.
It is unacceptable for a commander-in-chief to neglect the soldiers who have sacrificed their lives under his command. In August 2021, while attempting to carry out President Biden’s ill-advised orders in Afghanistan, 11 Marines, one Army soldier, and one Navy corpsman lost their lives in a bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport Abbey Gate in Kabul.
Furthermore, did President Biden also overlook the three service members who were killed in a drone attack in Jordan just this January? It is worth noting that during the last eight months of President Trump’s first term, there were no hostile casualties in Afghanistan. This fact is significant, as it indicates that Afghanistan was more peaceful under President Trump than at any other time since the country’s invasion in 2001.
