The Biden administration blames Trump for the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan

On Thursday, the White House released the congressional-requested postmortem on the withdrawal from Afghanistan in a report that heavily blamed the Trump administration for the mess.

“President Biden’s choices for how to implement the withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by the conditions created by his predecessor,” the White House report said.

He then went forward giving other reasons for the withdrawal, including “America’s goal has never been to build a country” and saying that the American presence there had “unclear goals and no end in sight”.

The document notes that when Donald Trump took office in 2017, there were 10,000 troops in Afghanistan.

President Trump has ordered direct talks with the Taliban without consulting our allies and partners or allowing the Afghan government to sit at the negotiating table. In September 2019, President Trump emboldened the Taliban by publicly considering inviting them to Camp David on the anniversary of 9/11.

The document said the Biden White House was carrying out Trump’s order from the White House to withdraw troops by the summer of 2021 but claimed Trump’s team left them with no plans for how to withdraw the last 2,500 troops remaining.

Trump had made an agreement to withdraw the troops by May 2021 but Biden has promised to withdraw them by September. The document said that Biden must implement the withdrawal that Trump agreed to, or the Taliban will start attacks on American forces.

The document also blamed Trump for the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) backlog, saying that the previous administration’s “disregard and even hostility toward our commitment to Afghan allies” resulted in about 18,000 people waiting for their visas to be processed. She said Trump halted all interviews with SIV despite his plans to withdraw.