As his hasty Afghanistan exit looms larger as a strategic blunder, President Biden is still blaming his predecessor for the debacle, arguing the former President Trump tied his hands.
It’s Trump’s fault, the administration insists, that Afghanistan has collapsed into a pre-9/11 narco-terrorist state run by medieval mullahs brutalizing women all over again.
“The last president signed an agreement to get out,” Biden reminded reporters during last month’s marathon White House press conference.
But the truth is, it was the other way around.
Trump essentially inherited what Biden started nine years earlier as vice president, according to White House e-mails and U.S. officials who investigated his old office’s secret dealings with the Taliban.
Biden had advocated withdrawing from Afghanistan when he served as President Obama’s vice president. The White House shared a common goal with the Taliban in ending the war, concerned as it was that the long troop deployment looked like the “occupation” of a Muslim nation. And Biden’s then-national security adviser — Antony “Tony” Blinken — spearheaded an effort to achieve that goal, which included as its centerpiece a once-covert plan to spring from the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison basically the entire old leadership of the Taliban captured by U.S. forces after the 9/11 attacks.
How they LEFT Americans & Billions in Military (working) equipt & weapons BEHIND !!!!!