Last year, a White House staffer dressed as Easter Bunny prevented President Joe Biden from answering questions about his botched Afghanistan withdrawal.
This Easter, the administration released a useless official “assessment” to do much the same. And you won’t be shocked, I suspect, to discover that the administration places most of the blame for the deadly debacle, which saw 13 American servicemen and over 170 Afghans murdered at the Abbey Gate outside Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, on Donald Trump.
Indeed, the Afghanistan nation-building experiment was a bipartisan, trans-administrational disaster. In over 20 years, thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars were spent trying to build a self-sustaining Afghan military, police, infrastructure, educational system, and “democracy.” All of it fell in only 20 days to the Taliban. But it wasn’t Trump who promised a “safe and orderly” departure. It wasn’t Trump who failed to evacuate thousands of Americans and allies before the country collapsed. Nor was it Trump who left behind billions in military equipment to the Taliban. It was Biden who gave Islamists their “Fall of Saigon” moment.
Perhaps a Republican president would have ignored warnings from military leaders regarding the dangers of staying wedded to the Taliban’s timeline. Maybe they would have ignored warnings from intelligence officials that terrorists might take advantage of unsecured paths that U.S. officials were actually encouraging civilians to use to get to the airport. But it wasn’t. It was Biden who oversaw all of it in an effort to get an
