Did you watch President Biden’s speech last night? If not let me tell you, for a man who promised to admit when he was wrong, and take responsibility for his mistakes, he spent a lot of time blaming others, and explaining how he was not responsible.
Remember Biden’s interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News? During that interview he swore he was “committed to making sure that the troops stay until every American who wants to be out is out.”
Last night, with the evacuation ended, he said 90% of the Americans who wanted to leave Afghanistan were able to be evacuated.
Biden shifted the blame for many of the remaining Americans who were left behind to the people themselves, suggesting they took too long to decide to leave.
During the evacuation, numerous times Americans and our allies were told NOT to attempt to travel to the airport to be evacuated because it was too dangerous to navigate the Taliban check points. Later, they were told NOT to attempt to go to the airport because of the danger from terrorist attacks!
But perhaps they do bare some of the blame for being left behind. After all, they did trust Biden and did make the decision to trust him and his administration to help them, and listened to him when he told them not to go to the airport.
And then there were the lies, exaggerations, and misdirection.
Biden repeated the claim that, “The assumption was that more than 300,000 Afghan National Security Forces that we had trained over the past two decades and equipped would be a strong adversary in their civil wars with the Taliban.”
The truth is, the Afghan military consisted of less than 179,000 active members. Biden was including the national police in his count, and the last time I checked the police are not trained or equipped for national defense.
Biden also mentioned 18 US veterans commit suicide every day. The question that needs to be asked is, what does that have to do with the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and the hundreds of Americans who were left behind? No one is suggesting we should have stayed, they are saying the withdrawal was done in the worst possible way!
Biden also talked about the cost of the war in Afghanistan over the past 20 years, and the necessity for withdrawing. But again, no one is arguing against the withdrawal, they are condemning him for the absolute disaster that occurred when his withdrawal plan was executed.
On the evacuation itself, Biden said “No nation has ever done anything like it in all of history,” the president said of the massive U.S. evacuation efforts. “Only the United States had the capacity and the will and the ability to do it, and we did it today.”
However, the truth is the US didn’t do it on our own. Numerous countries and private companies and organizations joined in the effort to evacuate people from Afghanistan.
Britain has evacuated more than 15,000 people, Germany and Italy evacuated more than 5,000 people each, Qatar evacuate more than 40,000 people, the United Arab Emirates evacuate 36,500 people, Australia evacuated more than 4,100 people. Canada, France, Sweden, Belgium, Hungary, Poland, South Africa, Ukraine, Austria, India, and other countries were responsible for evacuating thousands more.
Here’s something interesting. If you add up the number of people evacuated by all the countries that helped with the evacuations (the ones listed above and others not listed), it comes to approximately 115,000. According to the White House, the US and its allies have evacuated about 123,000 people from Afghanistan since July. That would mean the US has evacuated approximately 8 thousand people since July.
But the US coordinated the evacuation with allies to increase the number of people that could be evacuated, right? Actually many countries openly criticized the US, claiming the state department’s performance actually hindered evacuation efforts, and that the evacuation went as well as it did in spite of it.
And yet despite close allies like Britain evacuating nearly twice as many people as the US, and other allies claiming the US state department hindering evacuation efforts, Biden is claiming:
“Only the United States had the capacity and the will and the ability to do it, and we did it today.”
I’m reminded of something Adam Savage once said on the tv show ‘Myth Busters”
“I reject your reality, and substitute my own!”
That is apparently now the motto of the President of the United States.