Democrat Congresswoman Barbara Lee said on Sunday that the chaotic troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 was former president Donald Trump’s doing and that President Joe Biden doesn’t deserve any blame for the chaos.
In an appearance on CNN on Sunday, Lee told host Jake Tapper: “I don’t believe the administration deserves any blame for this [withdrawal],” adding that “we have to remember that Donald Trump made this agreement [to withdraw] with the Taliban.”
“Secondly, the Trump administration literally gutted our State Department and our diplomatic corps,” Lee continued. “I believe that the State Department and those that were involved in this, you know, end of the Afghanistan war – which should have happened before then, I believe – did the best they could. Having said that, it wasn’t as smooth as we would have liked to have seen it.”
Lee’s comments come just over a week after the US State Department released its report on the Afghanistan withdrawal following pressure to do so by the House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul.
The report found that both Trump and Biden had “insufficient senior-level consideration” of what could go wrong during a withdrawal. “The decisions of both President Trump and President Biden to end the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan had serious consequences for the viability of the Afghan government and its security,” the report stated.
The US withdrawal saw Afghan government forces collapse almost immediately against the Taliban, and 13 US service members were killed in a suicide bombing while defending the evacuation at the Kabul airport.
