The Biden administration admits to having made some mistakes — some — in its withdrawal from Afghanistan, but the admission doesn’t come close to acknowledging the catastrophe that occurred during the August 2021 retreat. Ex-President Donald Trump, meanwhile, is in full-force denial over his role in that catastrophe. Both are to blame, and to a certain extent, so are Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush for the abysmal deployment, training and ambivalent nation-building decisions that contributed to the Taliban takeover after 20 years of U.S. occupation.
Trump seized upon a Pentagon report to Congress that listed what went right and wrong during the withdrawal. The report blamed the Trump administration for the way it negotiated the U.S. withdrawal and for refusing to share crucial pullout-planning details during the change of administrations. Biden’s spokesman, John Kirby, conceded, “Clearly, we didn’t get things right here with Afghanistan with how fast the Taliban was moving across the country.”
With characteristic subtlety and presidential humility, Trump exploded on his Truth Social website: “These Morons in the White House, who are systematically destroying our Country, headed up by the biggest Moron of them all, Hopeless Joe Biden, have a new disinformation game they are playing — Blame ‘TRUMP’ for their grossly incompetent SURRENDER in Afghanistan.”
The withdrawal unquestionably was a disaster. But Trump is the one who must own the “surrender.” All Biden did was honor the terms of an agreement that Trump negotiated unilaterally with the Taliban — excluding U.S. Western coalition partners and the democratically elected government in Kabul. Trump had four years in power to work out a smoother pullout schedule while holding Taliban forces at bay. He chose retreat and ordered U.S. forces to stand down.
It was Trump’s strategic and military incompetence — alluded to by his own administration officials — coupled with abysmal negotiating errors that ceded everything to the Taliban and set the stage for catastrophe. Lacking a withdrawal plan, the Biden administration was forced to organize one from scratch as a Taliban-dictated deadline approached.
None of this lets Biden off the hook. There were scores of options for executing the withdrawal while ensuring that the Afghans who worked closely with the United States could get out safely instead of having to swarm U.S. troop planes and fall from the landing-gear assembly as planes took off. The deaths of 13 U.S. service members during that chaos are Biden’s to own.
The administration’s publicly released executive summary reads more like a political justification than a serious lessons-learned admission of errors. The legacy of shame is one that this administration and its predecessors deserve to share.
