Pres. Biden Defends Afghan Withdrawal By Blaming Others

As we told you, the Taliban has taken over Afghanistan. President Biden was left to defend his decision and answer to the American people involving his strategy to pull U.S. citizens and troops out of Afghanistan. Even after everything we have seen in the last 24 hours, President Biden stands behind his decision.

ACLJ Senior Military Analyst, Ret. Colonel Wes Smith gave his analysis of the President’s speech:

This is chaos – unnecessary chaos. There’s that old military saying that says no plan lasts past first contact with the enemy. It had to be prepared for contingencies, because things don’t go right. When the President spoke yesterday instead of talking about the things that happened and how it got out of control, he defended the decision that almost no one disagrees with – almost all Americans agree that we should get out of Afghanistan. But it was the chaos and crisis of humanity there that he either did not address or that he simply blamed it on someone else.

President Biden began to first blame former President Trump for the circumstances in Afghanistan:

When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban. . . . The choice I had to make, as your President, was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season.

Then, President Biden goes even further and blames the Afghan people:

So, what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision. American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.

President Biden also claimed in his speech that his withdrawal plans included planning for every contingency. You can read his full speech here. Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Analyst Matt Zeller joined MSNBC as a guest and pointed out this blatant lie:

I feel like I watched a different speech than the rest of you guys. I was appalled. There was such a profound bold-faced lie in that speech. The idea we planned for every contingency? I have been personally trying to tell this Administration since it took office. I have been trying to tell our government for years this was coming. We sent them plan after plan on how to evacuate these people. Nobody listened to us.

ACLJ Senior Counsel for Global Affairs and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was directly involved in the Trump Administration’s strategy for getting troops out of Afghanistan. Secretary Pompeo explained the difference in the two Administration’s strategies:

Well look, this is not the time for the assignment of blame. We’ve got to make sure we get the Americans there that are trapped . . . . We need to make sure that our military is focused on that and that alone. We’ve got to make sure we get those folks out. But as for the strategy, we were very clear. President Trump wanted to get our boys and girls home. Nobody is squawking the objective of getting our men and women out of Afghanistan. But they have seemed to have forgotten two basic rules. When you have to execute this in a way that reflects the history and context of what is going on, and second there is a real responsibility to make sure that we reduce the risk that we are ever attacked from that place again. President Trump gave me the mission to do each of those two things. We withdrew 12,500 folks, so call it 80 plus percent of our forces. We had drawn down to around 2,500 by the time we left January of last year. We had stability. We hadn’t had an American killed since February of 2020. Because the Taliban understood that President Trump and I were serious about protecting America. From the pictures you can see on TV; it does not look like our leader has done this . . . that weakness was something that came to be known from the Taliban and they ran the table. And now we find ourselves in a place where the President says he planned for everything, but yet had to on an emergency basis send back in even more troops that were there 12 months before that. It’s really sad.

It is extremely sad to see the tragedies on display in the news from Afghanistan. While most people would agree that it was time for the U.S. to leave, the execution of the plan is the source of debate. We will continue to monitor this situation and provide updates.

Today’s full Sekulow broadcast is complete with even more analysis of President Biden’s speech following the removal of all U.S. citizens and troops out of Afghanistan.

Watch the full broadcast below.