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The White House on Thursday mounted a vehement defense of President Biden’s decision-making in Afghanistan, seeking to put a shine on the calamitous withdrawal as the Pentagon and State Department sent classified reports to Congress detailing the failures.
Administration officials placed heavy blame on President Trump for setting the withdrawal in motion and on Afghanistan itself, saying the troubled nation’s military wasn’t trained, its government wasn’t competent and its people were too ready to capitulate.
But the White House also said Mr. Biden deserves credit for carrying out the withdrawal after 20 years of war, saying he made the best choices possible and couldn’t have foreseen just how quickly the Taliban would defeat Afghan forces that lacked U.S. backing.
“President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor,” the National Security Council said in its 12-page report.
Officials also said the U.S. is better off after the withdrawal, arguing Mr. Biden would not have been able to lead a coalition in backing Ukraine against Russia’s invasion if America was still committed to Afghanistan.
‘When the president made the decision to leave Afghanistan, some worried that doing so could weaken our alliances or put the United States at a disadvantage on the global stage. The opposite has happened,” the White House said.
The report continued: “On the global stage, America is leading. We have rallied our allies and partners to support Ukraine and hold Russia accountable for its aggression—and to rise to compete with China. It is hard to imagine the United States would have been able to lead the response to these challenges as successfully—especially in the resource-intensive way that it has—if U.S. forces remained in Afghanistan today.”
The White House summary was met with disbelief from Republican lawmakers, who said the withdrawal was a signal of weakness that set Russian President Vladimir Putin on a course to invade Ukraine, and emboldened Chinese President Xi Jinping’s more aggressive approach astride the world.
“Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, our Middle East partners’ outreach to Beijing, and Xi’s increased threats to Taiwan are all connected to and arise from this debacle,” said Sen. James Risch of Idaho, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
