U.S. PRESIDENT FACES FLAK AT HOME FOR DECISION TO EXIT AFGHANISTAN
WASHINGTON: CNN news anchor Jake Tapper’s first question to US secretary of state Antony Blinken on his Sunday morning show captured the sense of how the rest of the United States was viewing President Joe Biden’s recent decisions on Afghanistan: “How did President Biden get this so wrong?”
As the morning hour wore on and Al Jazeera news channel began running clips of Taliban fighters walking around inside the presidential palace abandoned by outgoing President Ashraf Ghani, Biden was facing similar questions from both supporters and critics, with varying degrees of outrage and frustration.
“This is going to be a stain on this president and this presidency,” said Michael Mccaul, the top Republican on the House foreign relations committee, on the same programme with Tapper. “I think he is going to have blood on his hands for what they did.”
Ryan Crocker, who was president Barack Obama’s ambassador to Afghanistan, could sense the impending disaster. “I’m left with some grave questions in my mind about his ability to lead our nation as commanderin-chief,” Crocker told The Spokesman-review, a Washington state publication, on Sunday morning, shortly before news came of the Taliban entering Kabul.
“To have read this so wrong or, even worse, to have understood what was likely to happen and not care,” the former ambassador of the Obamabiden administration added.
Biden and his officials have blamed the “hollow” response of the Afghan army and security forces and their inability to hold off the Taliban despite their numerical superiority and better Us-supplied equipment.
“We would have been back at war with tens of thousands of troops having to go in because the 2,500 troops we had there and the air power would not have sufficed to deal with the situation, especially as we see, alas, the hollowness of the Afghan security forces,” Blinken said in the CNN interview.