Former President Donald Trump released a statement offering sympathy to the families of the 13 soldiers killed in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan Thursday while the Biden administration attempts to pin the blame for the chaos on Trump.
“Melania and I send our deepest condolences to the families of our brilliant and brave Service Members whose duty to the U.S.A. meant so much to them,” Trump said in a statement Thursday hours before Biden addressed the American people. “Our thoughts are also with the families of the innocent civilians who died today in the savage Kabul attack. This tragedy should never have been allowed to happen, which makes our grief even deeper and more difficult to understand. May God Bless the U.S.A.”
BIDEN DOESN’T DENY REPORT OF US HANDING OVER NAMES OF AMERICANS TO TALIBAN: ‘THERE MAY HAVE BEEN’
The Biden administration has faced scrutiny as recently as Thursday for continuing to work with the Taliban to get Americans out of Afghanistan and Biden has been widely criticized for his hasty and chaotic withdrawal from the country.
Amid the chaotic scramble at Kabul’s airport to evacuate the remaining Americans and U.S. allies out of Afghanistan following the swift collapse of the Afghan government and military at the hands of the repressive Taliban forces, a blame game of sorts has broken out among President Biden and his predecessor in the White House.
Biden has repeatedly cited his predecessor in multiple statements and speeches and Trump has issued a flurry of statements the past couple of days, going as far as arguing that it’s time for the president “to resign in disgrace.”
Biden officials have attempted to make the argument that the administration was handcuffed by an agreement with the Taliban signed by President Trump in Doha, Qatar in February 2020, which included a U.S. pledge to remove troops from Afghanistan.
“I bear responsibility for, fundamentally, all that’s happened of late,” Biden said Thursday. “But, you know as well as I do that the former president made a deal with the Taliban to get all American forces out of Afghanistan by May 1.”
But Biden can go only so far in claiming that agreement boxed him in. It had an escape clause: The U.S. could have withdrawn from the accord if Afghan peace talks failed. They did fail, but Biden chose to stay in the agreement, although he delayed the complete pullout from May to September.
PSAKI DEFLECTS QUESTION OF HOW US CAN CONTINUE TO WORK WITH TALIBAN AFTER DEADLY SUICIDE BOMBING
Chris Miller, acting defense secretary in the final months of the Trump administration, chafed at the idea that Biden was handcuffed by the agreement.
“If he thought the deal was bad, he could have renegotiated. He had plenty of opportunity to do that if he so desired,” Miller, a top Pentagon counterterrorism official at the time the Doha deal was signed, told The Associated Press in an…
Read More: Biden, Trump camps play blame game as situation in Afghanistan continues to