- Trump has repeatedly blamed Biden for Afghanistan’s fall to the Taliban, even though the US withdrawal that triggered the collapse was negotiated by his administration
- Taliban leaders are trying to hammer out a new government after their forces swept across the country as US-led forces pulled out after two decades
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US soldiers stand guard as Afghans gather near the military part of the airport in Kabul hoping to flee. Photo: AFP |
Former US president Donald Trump launched a sustained attack on President Joe Biden’s handling of the retreat of US forces from Afghanistan, which he called “the greatest foreign policy humiliation” in US history.
Trump, a Republican who has dangled the possibility of running again for president in 2024, has repeatedly blamed Biden, a Democrat, for Afghanistan’s fall to the Islamist militant Taliban, even though the US withdrawal that triggered the collapse was negotiated by his own administration.
“Biden’s botched exit from Afghanistan is the most astonishing display of gross incompetence by a nation’s leader, perhaps at any time,” Trump said at a boisterous rally packed with his supporters near Cullman, Alabama.
Taliban leaders are trying to hammer out a new government after their forces swept across the country as US-led forces pulled out after two decades, with the Western-backed government and military crumbling.
For his part, Biden has criticised the Afghan military for refusing to fight, denounced the now-ousted Afghan government and declared he inherited a bad withdrawal agreement from Trump.
At the rally, Trump blamed the situation on Biden not having followed the plan his administration came up with and bemoaned US personnel and equipment being left behind as troops withdrew.
Trump said the Taliban, with whom he had negotiated, respected him. He suggested the quick takeover of Afghanistan would not have happened if he was still in office.
“We could have gotten out with honour,” Trump said. “We should have gotten out with honour. And instead we got out with the exact opposite of honour.”
The Taliban has also sought to blame the US for the chaotic scenes at Kabul’s airport as thousands of Afghans clamoured to be evacuated.
“America, with all its power and facilities... has failed to bring order to the airport,” Taliban official Amir Khan Mutaqi said on Sunday. “There is peace and calm all over the country, but there is chaos only at Kabul airport.”
In Britain, former prime minister Tony Blair, who in 2001 took the UK into war in Afghanistan alongside the US, on Saturday condemned their “abandonment” of the country as “dangerous” and “unnecessary”.
In his first public comments on the crisis since the Afghan government collapsed last weekend, Blair used a wide-ranging article published on his foundation’s website to heavily criticise Western actions.
“The abandonment of Afghanistan and its people is tragic, dangerous, unnecessary, not in their interests and not in ours,” Blair wrote.
“In the aftermath of the decision to return Afghanistan to the same group from which the carnage of 9/11 arose, and in a manner which seems almost designed to parade our humiliation, the question which allies and enemies alike pose, is: has the West lost its strategic will?”
The former UK premier, a controversial figure both in Britain and abroad over his strong support for US-led military action in both Afghanistan and then Iraq, went on to argue Western allies’ current strategy would harm them long-term.
“The world is now uncertain of where the West stands because it is so obvious that the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in this way was driven not by grand strategy but by politics,” Blair stated.
“We did it with every Jihadist group round the world cheering,” he added. “Russia, China and Iran will see and take advantage. Anyone given commitments by Western Leaders will understandably regard them as unstable currency.”
One of Britain’s longest-serving leaders in power for a decade from 1997, Blair forged a close alliance with former US president George W. Bush during the latter’s so-called war on terror.
His steadfast support for the increasingly unpopular military interventions in the Middle East cost Blair considerably, and was seen as a key factor in him standing down and handing power to his successor Gordon Brown in 2007.
In his article, Blair insisted the West’s retreat from Afghanistan would lead allies and adversaries to ask if it was “in epoch-changing retreat?”.
He said the Western alliance must “give tangible demonstration that we are not”, setting out practical steps for engagement in the country and with the Taliban which has seized power.
Beyond that, he also called for a strategic rethink of how the West addresses “radical Islam” while launching a limited defence of Western interventionism.
“We have learned the perils of intervention in the way we intervened in Afghanistan, Iraq and indeed Libya. But non intervention is also policy with consequence,” Blair wrote. “What is absurd is to believe the choice is between what we did in the first decade after 9/11 and the retreat we are witnessing now.”
Blair’s comments come as current leader Boris Johnson faces severe criticism over his handling of the crisis, including that Britain has been too weak to influence events.
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