White House Blames Trump for Afghan Exit Ahead of TV Debate

In the leadup to Tuesday night’s presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, a separate debate is occurring in Washington over who was at fault for the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

The back-and-forth, which one expert referred to as “electoral posturing,” shows that Afghanistan could play a key role in this year’s race, with Republicans pulling out all stops to implicate Harris in the perceived foreign policy failures of the past three and a half years.

During a Monday afternoon press briefing, White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby spoke to reporters about the 2021 withdrawal, and argued that Biden’s hands were tied by policies of the previous administration.

“The Trump administration cut a deal called the Doha Agreement that mandated a complete U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Kirby said. “And, yes, that included Bagram Air Base by the end of May 2021.”

Kirby was referring to the agreement, signed between the Trump administration and the Taliban in February 2020, which promised to bring an end to America’s 20-year presence in the country, and the air base which swiftly fell into Taliban hands following the U.S. exit.

“President Biden, for his part, faced a stark choice when he came to office: abide by the flawed agreement and end America’s longest war or blow up the deal, extend the war, and see a much smaller contingent of American troops back in combat with the Taliban,” Kirby said.

Kirby also claimed that the deal “demoralized and disenfranchised” the ruling Afghan government and military, who saw it as confirmation that they would be left to fend for themselves against the militant group.

His comments came in response to a critical report on the withdrawal issued by Republicans from the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Sunday.

This report, entitled “Willful Blindness,” blamed the Biden-Harris administration for the rushed exit, and for the “chaotic evacuation from Kabul in August of 2021 that resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. servicemembers,” referring to the ISIS-K suicide bombing of Hamid Karzai Airport in August 2021, in which 13 servicemembers and over 150 Afghans lost their lives.

When contacted for comment, the Harris campaign shared a statement from Harris-Walz 2024 National Security Spokesperson Morgan Finkelstein, which read: “Trump shamelessly attacks the Vice President because he hopes he can trick the country into forgetting that his own actions undermined U.S. strategy and put our troops and allies in harm’s way.”

“My sense is that both Biden and Trump agreed on two things: the need to get out of Afghanistan and the fact that preceding US presidents left it far too late,” Ashley Jackson, Co-Director of the Centre on Armed Groups, told Newsweek, when asked who bore responsibility for the withdrawal. “It was a process that Trump started and Biden faithfully executed, which – in a strange way – makes it almost bipartisan.”

Jackson said that the decision to strike a deal with the Taliban and withdraw U.S forces had been floated since the Obama administration, given the growing belief that the war itself “could not be won.”

“It’s painful to think what might have been, but had political talks started much sooner, it would have likely saved many American lives and avoided the kind of disastrous withdrawal we saw in August 2021.”

The question over Afghanistan has emerged as one of the more contentious foreign policy issues in this year’s election.

Only nine percent of respondents in a recent New York Times-Siena College poll claimed that the 2021 withdrawal was not an issue in this year’s race, with 24 percent believing that Harris should receive “a lot of blame” for the problems which occurred during the exit.

Harris has done little to avoid her association with the move, confirming to CNN’s Dana Bash in April 2021 that she was “the last person in the room,” when Biden made the decision to move forward with the withdrawal.

The interview segment has been used by Republicans to implicate the vice president in both the withdrawal and the August 2021 bombing, and was referenced in a section Sunday’s report.

“Vice President Kamala Harris was the last person in the room when President Biden made the decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan,” the report read. “A fact she boasted shortly after President Biden issued his go-to-zero order.”

Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee released their own response to the report, with New York Representative Gregory Meeks accusing Republicans of taking “particular pains to avoid facts involving former President Donald Trump” in the withdrawal.

Jackson, who called the ongoing blame-game over Afghanistan “electoral posturing,” also believes Republican efforts to put the issue on America’s radar before Tuesday night’s debate will fall flat.

“Given everything else at stake, I don’t think many Americans will see this as a decisive issue,” Jackson said. “The war is over, and young Americans voting for the first time in this election won’t have even been born when 9/11 happened.”

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