Taliban take Afghanistan: Donald Trump calls on Joe Biden to resign ‘in disgrace’

Former president Donald Trump called for Joe Biden to ‘resign in disgrace’ following the collapse of the Afghan government and the takeover of Kabul by the Taliban.

Former president Donald Trump called for Joe Biden to “resign in disgrace” following the collapse of the Afghan government and the takeover of Kabul by Taliban forces, as US security forces scrambled to secure Hamid Karzai International Airport.

The Pentagon on Sunday night said almost 6000 troops would soon be on the ground in Afghanistan to ensure safe withdrawal of allied US civilians, consular staff and Afghans who faced retribution from the new fundamentalist regime.

“It is time for Joe Biden to ­resign in disgrace for what he has allowed to happen to Afghanistan, along with the tremendous surge in Covid, the Border catastrophe, the destruction of energy independence, and our crippled economy,” Mr Trump said.

The former president’s censure added to a welter of condemnation of the Biden administ­ration, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the former president’s promise to withdraw from Afghanistan by May 1 had forced Mr Biden’s hand.

“The idea that we could have maintained the status quo beyond May 1, that the President had ­decided to stay, I think is a – is a fiction,” Mr Blinken told CNN.

“We would have been back at war with the Taliban, and I’d probably be … explaining why we were sending tens of thousands of American forces back into ­Afghanistan and back to war.”

In an extraordinary turnaround in the fortunes of the Biden administration, which earlier last week had been celebrating the passage of a major bipartisan infrastructure bill through the Senate, Mr Biden, who campaigned on a theme of “Democracy is back”, now faces a human rights disaster, given the Taliban’s primitive attitudes to women.

Michael McCaul, the top ­Republican on the US House of Representatives foreign affairs committee, blasted the Biden ­administration: “This has been an unmitigated disaster of epic proportions … a stain on the presidency (who has) blood on his hands.

“They totally blew this, completely underestimated the strength of the Taliban … it’s going to be worse than Saigon,” he added, referring to the withdrawal of US troops from the south Vietnamese capital in 1975.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country on Sunday as the American flag came down on the US embassy in Kabul and the Biden administration scrambled to ensure the safety and security of Americans and Afghans who might become targets of the new fundamentalist regime.

With the President on holiday at Camp David, Mr Blinken was left in Washington to defend the Biden administration against charges of incompetence on Sunday as reports flooded in of chaos, collapse and humiliation in what could be the biggest foreign policy disaster since the implosion of Iraq after the US withdrawal in 2014.

“Tomorrow and over the coming days, we will be transferring out of the country thousands of American citizens who have been resident in Afghanistan, as well as locally employed staff of the US mission in Kabul and their families and other particularly vulnerable Afghan nationals,” the Pentagon said on Sunday night.

Demoralised Afghan security forces offered no resistance as the Taliban, which had seized most of the country in just over a week, appeared on Sunday morning on Kabul’s outskirts only days after a US defence official told Reuters the Taliban could retake the city “within 90 days”.

Former president Hamid Karzai, installed after the US ousted the Taliban in 2001, released a video from his home in Kabul, standing with his three daughters, urging a peaceful transition and asked security forces and the Taliban movement to work together to maintain order.

Mr McCaul said events had “undermined the US international standing in the world” in comments that reflected concern among foreign policy experts about the implications for the US’s increasingly aggressive competition with China.

“We look so weak and it’s so embarrassing … Don’t think for a minute now the Chinese won’t go into Afghanistan and get rare earth minerals and put a base there,” he said. “Our foreign ­adversaries, Russia, China, Iran, have been emboldened.”

Centre for New American ­Security president Richard Fontaine said the rationale for withdrawing from Afghanistan – to free up military and financial ­resources – for the confrontation with China, was “too simple”.

“What we will see now is time, energy and resources directed to the effects of what is happening in Afghanistan, over what would have been the case if we’d kept a smaller force there indefinitely,” he told The Australian.

“I hope that Afghanistan doesn’t return to being a sanctuary for ISIS and al-Qa’ida but there’s a good chance it will, and if that’s the case in a few years we’ll be back in Afghanistan conducting military operations.”

Mike Green, a security expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the Afghan army could not have been expected to fend off the Taliban without US support. “The US training, logistics and air power is what allowed them to operate as a national force and we pulled that all out abruptly … This will do more damage than good to the Indo-Pacific strategy but it won’t knock them off course in Asia,” he said.