President Biden is being eviscerated by Republicans over his administration’s evident burying of a scathing report from the State Department concerning the catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal ahead of the Fourth of July holiday, declaring it conveys “guilt” on his part.
In a typical Friday news dump, the State Department very, very quietly released an 87-page damning report that condemned the Biden administration’s failure to adequately prepare for the collapse of Afghanistan thanks to the Taliban in 2021 as American troops were yanked from the country.
The investigation of the withdrawal found a serious lack of leadership involved in conducting the departure from Afghanistan with questions about who was in charge before and during the chaos that ensued. That lack of leadership resulted in the deaths of 13 US service members and hundreds of Afghan civilians.
“It’s no coincidence that President Biden’s State Department waited until Friday evening, before a long weekend, to drop its assessment of the United States’ disastrous and embarrassing withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Rep. Greg Murphy (R-NC) told the Daily Mail in an interview. “That type of behavior conveys guilt and acceptance that the Biden Administration is culpable.”
“Of course, they don’t want you to know that, so they attempted to bury it in plain sight while Americans were gearing up to celebrate Independence Day with family and friends,” he pointed out.
Arrogantly shrugging off the findings of the report, Biden once again insisted he was right when a reporter dared to question him on the withdrawal from Afghanistan, “Remember what I said? I said al-Qaeda wouldn’t be there. I said we’d get help from the Taliban. What’s happening now? What’s going on? Read your press. I was right.”
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) nailed Biden for claiming al-Qaeda is no longer operating in Afghanistan. He said the statement was “divorced from reality.”
“It is completely divorced from reality for President Biden to claim that al-Qaeda is no longer operating in Afghanistan or that the Taliban has somehow become our national security partner in the region,” McCaul bluntly said in a statement on Thursday.
He pointed out that Al Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda, was found living in the capital city of Kabul in a home owned by a senior Taliban official. He was taken out in a drone strike last year by the US.
McCaul wasn’t done savaging Biden over the stupidity of it all claiming that al-Qaeda’s capabilities are growing rapidly and are “aided by the Taliban” through funding and “security cooperation.”
“President Biden’s words can only be interpreted as an attempt to whitewash the Taliban and al-Qaeda’s longstanding ties, and may even be an attempt to get America on the path of recognizing the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan,” McCaul asserted.
Murphy declared that House Republicans back McCaul and Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) of the House Armed Services Committee’s commitment in their efforts to stand up to the administration and the Taliban’s growing influence in Afghanistan.
“President Biden and Secretary Blinken can keep running interference, but we will do everything in our power to expose their abject failure in leadership that cost the lives of 13 service members, stranded Americans and Afghans that served alongside us, and left behind $85 billion of US military equipment for the Taliban,” Murphy proclaimed in his interview with the Daily Mail.
The State Department spread the blame around taking aim at both the Biden and Trump administrations for the failure in Afghanistan.
“The decisions of both President Trump and President Biden to end the US military mission in Afghanistan had serious consequences for the viability of the Afghan government and its security,” the report charged.
“Those decisions are beyond the scope of this review, but the (review) team found that during both administrations there was insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios and how quickly those might follow,” it speciously concluded.
Many contend that the disaster in Afghanistan was fully Biden’s mess. Blaming Trump when he had nothing to do with it seems a partisan reach that doesn’t pass the smell test.
The report also outlined a number of strategic failures as the Taliban overran cities claiming there wasn’t enough consideration given to “worst-case scenarios.”
That resulted in thousands of allies who helped the US in the war being left behind, abandoned behind enemy lines to their deadly fate. The chaos at Hamid Karzai International Airport was also a byproduct of a lack of planning and leadership as men, women, and children tried desperately to flee.
Despite the planning for the evacuation of Kabul allegedly beginning “some time” beforehand, the State Department claimed it was “hindered by the fact that it was unclear who in the Department had the lead.”
“It’s just shameful, and starting with the timing of the release, they dropped it on the afternoon of the Friday before the Fourth of July, which is just a naked attempt to bury it, to not have anybody pay attention to it,” Victoria Coates, a senior research fellow in international affairs and national security at The Heritage Foundation, commented. “But fortunately, there is such interest in this topic that they can’t. They can’t hide how bad this is and this is their own people doing the reporting.”
“The State Department was shifting blame to the Department of Defense, and basically nobody wanted to be left holding the bag. And what the result was was 13 dead American heroes in Kabul that didn’t need to be sacrificed,” Coates added.
The leftist blame game continues attempting to rewrite history but in the end, the commander-in-chief at the time bears the blame for the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan and that man was President Biden.
