National Review
As it turns out, Joe Biden’s rambling speech defending his botched Afghanistan withdrawal seems even more incoherent and contradictory when you read the transcript.
The president informed us that the withdrawal was handled more efficiently and gloriously than any in history, but also that the chaos surrounding it was the fault of the Afghan army and Donald Trump:
The assumption was that more than 300,000 Afghan national security forces that we had trained over the past two decades and equipped would be a strong adversary in their civil wars with the Taliban. That assumption, that the Afghan government would be able to hold on for a period of time beyond military drawdown, turned out not to be accurate. . . .
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. It included no requirement that Taliban work out a cooperative governing arrangement with the Afghan government. But it did authorize the release of 5,000 prisoners last year, including some of the Taliban’s top war commanders, among those who just took control of Afghanistan.
Fair enough, and our own Andrew McCarthy has written critically about that Trump-era deal. But contradictions abound in Biden’s remarks. The president of the United States, a man privy to the world’s best intelligence, was surprised by the fall of Afghanistan, and yet he saw no problem blaming Americans on the ground for not anticipating that collapse:
Since March, we reached out 19 times to Americans in Afghanistan, with multiple warnings and offers to help them leave Afghanistan, all the way back as far as March. After we started the evacuation 17 days ago, we did initial outreach and analysis and identified around 5,000 Americans who had decided earlier to stay in Afghanistan but now wanted to leave.
