A new book unearths how President Joe Biden genuinely believes there were no mistakes made during the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal. The upcoming book by Politico’s national security reporter Alexander Ward, titled, The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore Foreign Policy After Trump discusses how Biden’s public defense of his administration’s controversial withdrawal from Afghanistan was not just to save face politically.
“No one offered to resign [after the Afghanistan exit], in large part because the president didn’t believe anyone had made a mistake. Ending the war was always going to be messy,” said Ward in his upcoming book.
“Biden told his top aides, [National Security Adviser Jake] Sullivan included, that he stood by them and they had done their best during a tough situation,” Ward said, adding that a White House official had told him that “there wasn’t even a real possibility of a shake-up.”
However, “Human rights in Afghanistan are in a state of collapse [two years into the Taliban’s takeover], acutely affecting the lives of millions of women, men, girls and boys,” United Nations high commissioner for human rights Volker Turk said in September 2023. “The shocking level of oppression of Afghan women and girls is immeasurably cruel.”
The Washington Free Beacon points out that in fact, “much went wrong” however, as “Biden ended the United States’s 20-year military presence in Afghanistan, including the Taliban’s immediate takeover of Afghanistan following the exit of American troops, 13 American military service members killed in a suicide-bombing during the final stages of the evacuation, and thousands of American citizens and Afghan allies left stranded in Afghanistan.”
During the poorly coordinated evacuation, the Biden administration also left the Taliban “nearly $7.2 billion worth of aircraft, guns, vehicles, ammunition, and specialized equipment,” according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
