Miranda Devine: Joe Biden blamed everyone else for his failure in Afghanistan

Donald Trump, the Afghan army and even Barack Obama all got the blame from Joe Biden for the Afghanistan mess when he should look in the mirror, writes Miranda Devine.

After six days of silence as Afghanistan fell apart, Joe Biden finally addressed his nation — and blamed everyone but himself. Sure, the US President uttered the pro forma line on Monday: “The buck stops with me.”

But the sentiment was undercut by the rest of his speech.

He blamed Donald Trump, of course.

“When I came into office, I ­inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the ­Taliban,” he said.

He blamed the Afghan army for not defending themselves, which is unjust victim shaming, considering the Americans abandoned Bagram Airfield in the dead of night last month, denying their Afghan allies crucial air cover and support.

US President Joe Biden engaged in victim blaming after the Taliban took over Afghanistan. Picture: AFP

Biden even blamed his supposed best buddy Barack Obama for surging troop numbers when he was president. The critique might have carried more weight if he’d explained that it was Obama who released the five Taliban commanders, who engineered the fall of Kabul, from Guantanamo Bay prison in 2014.

But mainly Biden wrestled with a straw man, defending his reasons for the US leaving Afghanistan.

“I stand squarely behind my decision,’’ Biden said. “After 20 years I’ve learned the hard way. That there was never a good time to withdraw US forces.’’

Few Americans disagree with ending the 20-year war. It’s what Trump had promised to do.

What the world is screaming about is the ongoing disaster of the botched withdrawal.

And that was the one thing Biden did not address.

Even CNN described his words as “hollow” and nothing more than “finger pointing and blame”.

640 people escaping Afghanistan on board a US Air Force plane. Picture: Defenseone.com

Once Biden finished reading aloud from his teleprompter for 18 minutes, he turned around and walked out of the East Room at the White House without taking a single question from reporters.

Then he got back in his helicopter to resume his holiday at Camp David.

It was an extraordinarily inadequate response to the catastrophe that he has set in train.

The tragic scenes at Kabul airport will be forever etched in the American consciousness. How could you forget the sight of bodies falling through the air from an American plane after Afghans were seen desperately clinging to the fuselage as it took off? That is on Biden. And it was infuriatingly avoidable.

Since he and his Secretary of State Tony Blinken have been consistent in their attempts to blame Trump, I asked the former president what his plan had been to get out of Afghanistan — a plan ultimately thwarted by the same US generals who gave Biden a green light.

Former US President Donald Trump has told Miranda Devine that he wouldn’t have allowed people to be slaughtered in Afghanistan. Picture: AFP

“We were going to not let people get slaughtered,” Trump told me on the phone on Sunday.

“I wanted to get out. But you have to get out safely and you have to get out with respect.

“We had all sorts of conditions.

“All civilians were going to come out before the military. Everyone should have been out before they took our military out.

“I was going to close this ridiculous embassy they spent a billion dollars on and move everybody out.

“I was going to blow up every military base [before we left]. I was going to take out every single piece of equipment. I said I don’t want anything left [apart from] leave each soldier a gun.

“Plus, I had a relationship with the Taliban where they knew they weren’t allowed to do this. They understood they were going to get hit very hard. What I had was conversations with the [Taliban] leadership where I said if you do anything we were going to hit them like they haven’t been hit before.”

Trump said the Taliban “no longer has fear or respect for America’’.

Deposed Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has fled the country. Picture: AFP

“It’s a terrible, terrible black eye for this country,” he said.

“We’re a laughing-stock. The whole world can’t believe it. And there was no reason for it.”

He also criticised Afghanistan’s president Ashraf Ghani, who fled the country on Sunday.

“I was never a fan of Ghani — he lives very high. I said he’ll be the first on the plane out and look what ­happened.”

Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who began negotiating with the Taliban in February 2020, to lay down conditions for a US withdrawal, has corroborated Trump’s version of events.

Pompeo was in the room when Trump warned the Taliban’s senior negotiator Mullah Baradar that if a single American was hurt or threatened the entire wrath of American power would rain down on them.

“We never trusted the Taliban,” he told Fox News. “We made abundantly clear … we weren’t going to allow them to just walk away from any deal that they had struck. We were going to go crush them, we were going to impose real costs on them. We weren’t going to let them take these provincial capitals. They understood that American power was going to come to their village, to their community, to their friends and family.”

You can bet the Taliban believed Trump would make good on his threat.

When Kabul fell on Sunday, Biden was nowhere to be seen. The White House tweeted out a still photo of him sitting alone, in a room at Camp David, scribbling notes while watching a video conference of his national security team. Very reassuring.

Joe Biden is blaming the Trump Administration and Afghanis for the chaos in Afghanistan after his botched withdrawal of US Troops.

CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Blinken why the Biden administration didn’t evacuate people before withdrawing the military.

“It’s a question,’’ said Tapper, “of how poorly this was done. The idea that President Biden ordered 2500 service members out and now is sending … 5000 service members back in [to evacuate people left behind], does that not on its face value show that the exit was inadequately planned?”

Blinken simply had no answer. He kept trying either to blame Trump or pretend that the only alternative to this self-inflicted debacle was a ­forever war.

How inane Biden’s conceit looks now, when he was wandering around the G7 in June telling anyone who would listen that “America is back” and that he had single-handedly ­restored America’s global leadership and credibility after Trump had ­ruined it.

He has just been busy making the world less safe. He has been wokifying the US military, injecting the poison of critical race theory and transgender ideology to divide the troops, while launching a witch-hunt to identify some mythical “enemy within”.

It seems like only yesterday that General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was barking at a Republican member of Congress about “white rage”.

This feckless administration has wreaked untold damage at warp speed in seven months. These aren’t mistakes that you can bounce back from. They will have ramifications well into the future, and will put Australians at risk as well.

Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph