“We inherited a deadline. We did not inherit a plan,” the secretary of State said in congressional testimony
Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday vigorously defended the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan and his agency’s handling of the chaotic and deadly evacuation mission from the war-torn country, arguing that the president “inherited” a disaster-in-the-making from Donald Trump.
Blinken said the Biden administration was handcuffed by Trump’s agreement with the Taliban, which in part reduced the U.S. troop presence to 2,500 by the time Biden took office. With the Taliban continuing its “relentless” military campaign regardless of that agreement, Blinken said, Biden “immediately faced the choice between ending the war or escalating it.”
While Republicans zeroed in on the recent events that led to the fall of Kabul, Democrats sought to broaden the scope of the hearing to include an examination of the mistakes made under presidents of both parties for nearly two decades.“We are seeing domestic politics injected into foreign policy,” Foreign Affairs Chair Gregory Meeks said of Republicans’ criticisms of the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal.
That delay forced a scramble inside the U.S. government, with Biden sending more than 5,000 troops to secure the main airport in Kabul, where the U.S.-led evacuation mission was headquartered. In response to criticism from Republicans about U.S. citizens being left behind in Afghanistan, Blinken said U.S. diplomatic staff began urging Americans to leave the country as early as March. Still, Biden acknowledged last month that “this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated,” but argued that the rapid collapse of the Afghan government showed that it was the “right decision” to leave Afghanistan.
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