The Washington Post should probably relaunch its presidential fact-checker database that shuttered shortly after former President Donald Trump left office.
Nearly everything President Joe Biden assured the public regarding his withdrawal from Afghanistan has since been proven wrong. That includes his promise the Taliban wouldn’t retake the country. It includes his promise that Americans wouldn’t be left behind.
Biden asserted on Aug. 20 he had seen “no question of our credibility from our allies around the world” regarding his White House’s handling of the retreat from Afghanistan. “Matter of fact, the exact opposite I’ve got,” the president said.
This is simply not true. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson explicitly said, amid the chaos, “When the United States decides emphatically to withdraw in a way that they have, clearly we’re going to have to manage the consequences.”
That is not a statement of confidence or trust in U.S. credibility.
The British Parliament also condemned Biden, its members excoriating the president’s rhetoric and management of the retreat.
Biden promised the withdrawal would be “orderly and secure.” It was anything but. The murder of 13 U.S. service members and an estimated 100 Afghans in a Kabul terrorist attack puts the exclamation point on that fact.
Earlier, on Aug. 19, Biden said, “We’re going to do everything in our power to get all Americans out and our allies out.”
He added, “If there’s American citizens left, we’re going to stay to get them all out.”
On Monday, after the last U.S. soldier left Afghanistan, bringing a close to America’s longest war, the Pentagon revealed it left behind as many as 250 U.S. nationals. Thousands of more Afghan allies were refused safe passage out of the country.
In 2001, then-Sen. Biden said, “We cannot and certainly will not walk away from 7 million displaced desperate Afghanis surviving on little more than grass and locusts.”
That’s basically what we are doing now.
When pressed a few weeks ago to defend the “pandemonium” outside the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, which the White House designated as the lone evacuation point for the entire country, Biden deflected.
“No one’s being killed right now,” he said. “God forgive me if I’m wrong about that, but no one’s being killed right now.”
At the time he made this statement, news and humanitarian groups in Kabul reported Taliban forces were already executing “detained soldiers, police, and civilians with alleged ties to the Afghan government,” as Human Rights Watch put it at the time. Taliban militants were also reportedly going door to door in search of “traitors” and threatening the family members of suspected collaborators.
“It is in writing that, unless they give themselves in,” said the Norwegian Center for Global Analyses’s Christian Nellemann, “the Taliban will arrest and prosecute, interrogate, and punish family members on behalf of those individuals.”
Agnès Callamard of Amnesty International said elsewhere, “The cold-blooded brutality of these killings is a reminder of the Taliban’s past record, and a horrifying indicator of what Taliban rule may bring … These targeted killings are proof that ethnic and religious minorities remain at particular risk under Taliban rule in Afghanistan.”
So once again, Biden fibbed. Or do these deaths not count?
On Aug. 16, Biden claimed he and his White House had planned for “every contingency” in Afghanistan. If we are to believe this, then Biden meant to strand hundreds of U.S. nationals in a hostile foreign country, in addition to $65 billion in valuable state-of-the-art military equipment. He intended for those attempting to reach the evacuation point to first go through Taliban checkpoints.
Earlier, on July 8, Biden asserted the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan would not mirror the 1975 fall of Saigon.
“The Taliban is not the North Vietnamese army,” the president scoffed. “They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”
Well, American staff were airlifted from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul shortly after Taliban militants stormed the capital city.
Biden also told reporters in July, “The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”
The Taliban retook Afghanistan in about a week. In response, Biden blamed the country’s fall on the Afghan people, claiming they were too cowardly and lacked the resolve to resist the terrorist takeover.
Biden assured the public the Afghan army was more than capable of holding off the terrorist group.
“I trust the capacity of the Afghan military,” he said, “who is better trained, better equipped, and more competent in terms of conducting war.”
Then, when the Taliban took over, Biden turned around and blamed the Afghan army for its cowardice and refusal to fight, even though it had lost some 60,000 soldiers and police since 2001 fighting the Taliban.
If they are so cowardly, why did so many die fighting? But then, if they are so cowardly, why was Biden so stupidly counting on them to fight?
In August, Biden said he would “insist we continue to keep the commitments we made of providing close air support, making sure [the Afghan] air force functions and is operable.”
As part of the U.S. exit from Afghanistan, Biden withdrew all air support and the maintenance crews tasked with the upkeep of the Afghan Air Force, effectively grounding it.
Biden also claimed no one “anticipated” the Taliban would so quickly overpower the Afghan military. However, the State Department explicitly warned of this exact scenario in July.
Biden claimed the Taliban cooperated with U.S. forces, helping to facilitate evacuations of U.S. nationals and allies.
“They’re cooperating, letting American citizens get out, American personnel get out, embassies get out, et cetera,” he said.
Reporting in Kabul contradicts this claim. Rather than having assisted the evacuation, Taliban forces reportedly barred Americans from reaching the airport, threatened journalists, fired shots at would-be evacuees, attacked crowds, and generally made it impossible for those wishing to leave the country to make it to the airport.
There’s a lot to take in here, and there will undoubtedly be additional examples of Biden’s false and contradictory statements about his disorderly, chaotic, neglectful withdrawal from Afghanistan.
If only there were a database or something to keep track of the president’s falsehoods, missteps, and lies.
