On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump referred to the continued chaos in Afghanistan as the "worst humiliation in American history," while defending the last-year agreement his government reached with the Taliban.
The 45th president told Fox News's "Hannity" on Tuesday, "It's a great thing that we're getting out, but nobody has ever handled a withdrawal worse than Joe Biden." “I believe this is our country's greatest embarrassment in history.”
Trump gave his first interview since the Taliban stormed Kabul on Sunday, capping a 96-hour assault that saw Afghanistan's major cities and provincial capitals fall to the Taliban with minimal opposition. While Trump was critical of the Biden administration, he also mirrored his successor's address to the nation on Monday, in which he blamed Afghan military and political leaders for the country's battlefield failure and the ensuing turmoil.
“I had a feeling they [Afghan security forces] wouldn't fight... ‘Why are they fighting?' I said. 'What is the purpose of these Afghan troops battling the Taliban?' To presenter Sean Hannity, Trump retold his story. “And I was fed a lot of false information by a variety of sources.
“They are, in fact, among the world's highest-paid soldiers. They were doing it for monetary gain since after we left, they stopped fighting... The truth is that our government was paying the Afghan forces a colossal sum of money. So we were essentially rewarding them to fight, which isn't the point.”
Trump, on the other hand, frequently lauded the Taliban as "good fighters," telling Hannity that "you have to give them credit for that," and claimed he got along better with them than recently ousted Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who left the country as Taliban troops closed in.
“To be honest, I never had a lot of faith in Ghani,” the former president said. “I stated it clearly and openly. I felt he was a complete thief. He got away with murder, I thought. He spent all of his time courting our senators. He had the senators in his pocket. That was one of our issues, but I never liked him, and I suppose based on his cash escape, I don't know, maybe that's a real tale. I have a feeling it is. All you have to do is examine his lifestyle and the places in which he resides. In a variety of ways, he got away with murder.”
The Trump administration announced a cease-fire deal with the Taliban in February 2020, stating that all US combat forces would leave Afghanistan by May 1 of this year. Biden said on Monday that the deal had constrained his hands.
“After May 1, there would have been no ceasefire. After May 1, there was no agreement to defend our soldiers. After May 1, there was no stable status quo without American casualties,” the president stated. “There was only the cold reality of either carrying out the agreement to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending tens of thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, bringing the conflict into its third decade.”
The deal was reached after Trump had a "strong conversation" with a Taliban leader, whom he named Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a contender to become the new government's supreme leader.
“Look, upfront, before we start, let me just tell you right now that if anything bad happens to Americans or anyone else, or if you ever come over to our land, we will hit you with a force as no country has ever seen before, a force so great you won't believe it,” he added.
“We lost no soldiers in the last year-and-a-half because of me and because of the understanding that we had,” Trump said as a consequence of the deal. Every weekend, a large number of individuals die in Chicago, New York, and other American cities. Because they knew I wasn't going to put up with it, we didn't lose any men in Afghanistan.”
Trump summed up two decades of American efforts in Afghanistan by calling the invasion decision in October 2001 "the worst decision ever made" and arguing that the US should have confined its reaction to airstrikes in response to the 9/11 attacks.
As new reports emerged of tens of thousands of Americans trapped in Taliban territory, with checkpoints separating them from Kabul's international airport, Trump declared that the current situation in Afghanistan was "many, many times worse" than the Iran hostage crisis that doomed another Democrat, Jimmy Carter's presidency.
“I saw that big, monster cargo plane yesterday with people grabbing the side and trying to get flown out of Afghanistan because of their fear, and they were blowing off the plane from 2,000 feet up in the air,” he added. “No one has ever seen anything like it before. Vietnam's helicopters will be blown away by this. That isn't even a competition. This is the most embarrassing period I've ever witnessed.”
