A slack-jawed old man looked straight at the floor and lied.
“When [Trump] was president, they were still killing people in Afghanistan and he didn’t do anything about that,” President Joe Biden rasped.
Watching the first presidential debate of 2024, I couldn’t believe Biden dared utter the word, “Afghanistan.” Our current commander-in-chief surrendered 20 years of hard-fought American accomplishments in that dusty, God-forsaken country. Biden handed Afghanistan to the Taliban — along with $8 billion worth of equipment and $2 trillion in lost investment.
Did he think we forgot that the Afghanistan debacle was on his watch? In office for less than three months, Biden insisted the scant 2,500 American troops in Afghanistan be completely withdrawn by Sept. 11, 2021. For comparison, note that Biden had ten times the number of troops guarding Washington for his own inauguration.
Though he later attempted to blame President Donald Trump for his Afghanistan disaster, Biden gave the order and it is archived right here at the Department of Defense.
By broadcasting our withdrawal date to the enemy, abandoning our most strategic military bases including Bagram Air Base and ignoring his top military advisors, Biden turned Operation Enduring Freedom into an enduring embarrassment for the United States.
Biden’s retreat from Kabul was the most humiliating American defeat since the British sacked Washington and burned the White House, Capitol and Navy Yard in August 1814.
As defeats tend to do, the debacle weakened American deterrence around the world. The failed Afghanistan withdrawal undoubtedly emboldened Vladimir Putin in his invasion of Ukraine six months later.
On CNN’s debate stage, Biden shamelessly doubled-down on his lie with yet another — even bigger — lie.
“The truth is, I’m the only president in this century… this decade… that [sic] doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world like [Trump] did,” he said.
For a commander-in-chief to forget the troops who have given their last measure of devotion on his watch is unconscionable. In August 2021, trying to fulfill Biden’s foolish Afghanistan orders, 11 Marines, one Army soldier and one Navy corpsman were killed in the bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport Abbey Gate in Kabul.
Did Biden also forget the three service members who were killed just this January in a drone attack in Jordan?
I served in Afghanistan in 2010-11 and was there again in December 2020 with acting-Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller. We had flown into Kabul to visit troops and meet with Afghanistan’s last U.S. commander, Gen. Austin S. Miller.
Here is a fact, briefed to us while there: In the last eight months of Trump’s first term, there wasn’t a single hostile casualty in Afghanistan. Let that sink in. Afghanistan was more peaceful under President Trump than at any other time since prior to America’s invasion in 2001.
Partisan pundits won’t admit it, but after four years of Trump in office, Afghanistan was stable.
America hadn’t entered any new conflicts. Putin dared not set a toe into Ukraine. Peace was breaking out all over the Middle East with the signing of the Abraham Accords. Russia wasn’t rushing into the arms of China and Iran. Even North Korea had paused its missile tests. In short, the world was more stable and secure.
Let’s hope most Americans will vote to return to Trump’s more effective foreign policy and military strategy.
Morgan Murphy is a former DoD press secretary, national security adviser in the U.S. Senate, a veteran of Afghanistan.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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