Do you miss me yet? Trump blames Biden for 'tragic mess' in Afghanistan!

WASHINGTON: With the Taliban waiting at the doors of Afghanistan capital Kabul after capturing almost the entire nation with its stunning advances, former US President Donald Trump has hit out at his successor Joe Biden and also said "miss me yet?"

The Taliban rapidly gaining control in Afghanistan has caused major embarrassment for President Joe Biden, who says he only stuck with the Trump administration's plans on ending the war and withdrawing US troops.

Twenty years of investment that cost $2 trillion and nearly 2,500 US lives is on the brink of complete disintegration within weeks as the Taliban seized Kandahar, Herat and is now dangerously close to Kabul.

Top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell said Biden allowed a "massive, predictable and preventable disaster" while former president Donald Trump has issued a statement denouncing the "tragic mess" and saying, "Do you miss me yet?"

LONG Who are the Taliban?

However, the Trump administration had set in motion the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in a February 2020 deal with the Taliban.

In a scathing editorial, The Washington Post has said that Joe Biden had put at risk the real progress in Afghanistan since 2001 including education for girls, banned by the Taliban when they last ruled.

The United States is rushing back its 3,000 troops -- roughly the same number removed in this month's final withdrawal -- to evacuate embassy staff and was flying out Afghans whose work with US forces puts them at risk even as the Taliban rapidly advances towards Kabul.

Biden has argued that the United States long ago achieved its main goal of defeating Al-Qaeda after the September 11, 2001 attacks and had done more than enough by training 300,000 Afghan troops. "They've got to fight for themselves, fight for their nation," Biden said Tuesday.

Critics have drawn parallels to the chaotic fall of Saigon in 1975 but the US president at the time, Gerald Ford, had been in office for less than a year and is rarely cast by historians as the sole to blame for the tortured US experience in Vietnam.

(With inputs from AFP)