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The chaotic withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan marked the end of Joe Biden’s honeymoon as president.
The scenes at Kabul airport as the clock ticked down to the final American departure evoked memories of another US humiliation – the last-minute scramble from the roof of the embassy in Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.
Biden’s poll numbers plunged from about 49 per cent approval at the start of August 2021 before the pull out to about 43 per cent a month later after it was over. The figures never really recovered to their previous levels.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan is one of the issues that Biden’s Republican opponents were determined to pursue after they took control of the House of Representatives in Washington earlier this year.
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The Biden administration provided a series of “after action” reviews about the withdrawal from Afghanistan to the US Congress on Thursday. These documents are classified and will not be released.
However, it published a 12-page summary document which seeks to avoid much of the responsibility for the chaos witnessed in August 2021 as American forces left Afghanistan after 20 years.
In a move that is likely to cause fury among Republicans, the Biden administration is unapologetic about ending involvement in the conflict but blamed the previous government of Donald Trump for the chaos surrounding it.
It says Biden refused to send another generation of Americans to fight a war that should have ended for the United States long before then.
The new report also appears to suggest that without a significant escalation, the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable by 2021.
“Ultimately, after more than 20 years, more than $2 trillion dollars, and standing up an Afghan army of 300,000 soldiers, the speed and ease with which the Taliban took control of Afghanistan suggests that there was no scenario – except a permanent and significantly expanded U.S. military presence – that would have changed the trajectory. ”
The Biden administration also argues that if the US had stayed in Afghanistan it would have been unable to provide the level of assistance that it has to Ukraine following the invasion by Russia.
But, ultimately, in the face of undoubted intense scrutiny by Republicans on the issue in the weeks and months ahead, the Biden White House is seeking to shift the narrative towards the actions of Trump.
[ ‘It feels like people don’t care about Afghanistan anymore. We’re not European, not white’ ]
“In September 2019, president Trump emboldened the Taliban by publicly considering inviting them to Camp David on the anniversary of 9/11. In February 2020, the United States and the Taliban reached a deal, known as the Doha agreement, under which the United States agreed to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by May 2021.”
It argues that despite setting this deadline and drawing down troop numbers, Trump had left no blueprint for how the end-game would work out.
It contends that the departing Trump administration had, in early 2021, left the incoming Biden government “with a date for withdrawal, but no plan for executing it”.