Most of President Joe Biden’s excuses for his botched withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan are embarrassing and contradictory. But Biden and his team blaming Afghans for not being “willing to fight for themselves” is particularly gross.
This was the line both Biden and national security adviser Jake Sullivan trotted out to help justify the administration’s decision to withdraw, even as they had no answer for why the withdrawal was as chaotic as it was.
Biden’s attempt to blame Afghan forces for his failures ignores reality. It also evinces a lack of that“empathy” that we were promised would come with Biden’s electoral victory.
Afghan forces were willing to fight for their country. The New York Times monthly report on casualties totals at least 2,499 Afghan security and pro-government forces have been killed in just the first seven months of 2021, which is more than the total number of American service members killed since the war began. Since the start of the war, roughly 66,000 Afghan police and military personnel have been killed.
As the Wall Street Journal reported, we trained the Afghan army in the mold of our own, meaning it had a heavy reliance on air support. Biden then pulled U.S. air support and the contractors who were servicing Afghanistan’s planes and helicopters.
As U.S. News and World Report detailed in July, the rapid withdrawal of contractors was “especially acute” for the “critical staff necessary to keep Afghanistan’s fledgling air force” in the skies.
As part of his withdrawal plan, Biden hamstrung the Afghan military. Then, to deflect blame for a result that he had repeatedly assured was unlikely, he spat on the Afghans who had been putting their lives on the line to fight the Taliban.
The merits of withdrawing or remaining in Afghanistan are irrelevant here. Biden and his administration horribly messed things up, costing many Afghans their lives, and this attempt to blame the Afghans for the mistakes is abhorrent.
This is Biden’s idea of American leadership on the global stage. This is, apparently, what Biden meant when he asserted that “America is back.” It’s disgraceful, all done in the service of Biden covering his backside from the catastrophic results of his own terrible decision making. Biden managed to botch every major step of this process, and the best he can do is blame 66,000 corpses and the Afghan soldiers we left behind to suffer Taliban reprisals.
