After listening to President Joe Biden’s speech on Monday defending his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ-05) joined former President Donald Trump and Democrat-turned-Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ-02) in calling on Biden to resign due to Afghanistan falling to the Taliban. Biden pulled out most of the U.S. troops from the country after 20 years of fighting the Taliban, a move that Trump had said would only be feasible if the Taliban stuck to the conditional peace agreement he negotiated a year and a half ago.
Biggs told Newsmax host Chris Saucedo that Trump had a plan to withdraw the troops in a manner that would have worked without leaving the country to the Taliban. “Most Americans didn’t want us to withdraw from Afghanistan, we just wanted to withdraw with honor and with a peaceful process to go ahead to save lives there and to save American lives and have a more secure future for this country after all that we have sacrificed.” He said Biden has been “absolutely incompetent in every way on every policy front whether domestic or foreign.”
Biggs went on, “He should be ashamed, he should be resigning quite frankly. It was perhaps the worst foreign policy performance in the history of America.”
He criticized Biden for deciding to leave Bagram Air Base without consulting the local Afghans first. He added, “He’s got a whole body of work over eight months that shows that this guy is incompetent to be president of the United States. He needs to take his vice president with him because neither of them are serious people, neither of them understand anything whether it’s the border to inflation to foreign policy with China, North Korea or Iran and now Afghanistan.”
Earlier this summer, during a press conference he gave on June 8, Biden defended the ability of Afghan troops to hold the country without the assistance of U.S. troops. In response to a question about whether the Taliban would take over, he responded, “No, it is not because you have the Afghan troops, 300,000 well-equipped, as well-equipped as any army in the world, and an air force, against something like 75,000 Taliban. It [is] not inevitable.” He said he trusts “the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more competent in terms of conducting war.” He said there were “zero” parallels between the Afghan withdrawal and the end of the Vietnam War.
A reporter next asked about a U.S. intelligence report claiming the Afghanistan crisis would lead to the collapse of Kabul, and Biden responded saying it was “not true.” The Taliban took Kabul on Saturday, posing for photos in the presidential palace.
Over the last few days, Biden ordered several thousand troops back to Afghanistan, in part to ensure that people are able to escape from the Kabul Air Base, increasing the numbers of troops there from 650 to 7,000. When Trump negotiated the peace agreement last year, there were 13,000 U.S. troops.
The Taliban began a successful military offensive on May 1 earlier this year. By July 21, half of all Afghan districts were under Taliban control. On August 10, U.S. officials warned that the capital, Kabul, could fall to the Taliban within 30 to 90 days. However, Biden did not waver from his decision on April 14 to withdraw all troops by September 11.
The Washington Post editorial board criticized Biden’s decision to go ahead with the withdrawal in an op-ed on July 2, saying the U.S. was allowing its ally to fend for itself against the Taliban with insufficient resources. They warned, “The president ought to be reconsidering the swift withdrawal he ordered in light of the incipient crumbling of an Afghan government and army that the United States spent two decades helping to build.” The op-ed went on, “The descent from stalemate to defeat could be steep and grim. We wonder whether he has fully considered the consequences.”
When the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996, they instituted a strict version of sharia law which banned women from working or studying and prohibited Western books and movies. If citizens broke certain rules, they were publicly whipped or executed. Several Afghans were caught on video Monday desperately grabbing onto U.S. Air Force planes leaving the country, but sadly falling to their deaths as the planes took off.
Watch the Newsmax interview:
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at the Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
