Under attack, Biden returns to White House to speak on Afghanistan!

Washington: US President Joe Biden will return to the White House and speak on Afghanistan at 1.15am on Tuesday in a bid perhaps to address criticism of the chaotic pullout of American troops and personnel and the swift return of the Taliban that he and his administration failed to foresee. Biden's return from the president's retreat where he was vacationing and the speech were announced in a revised guidance issued by the White House on Monday morning.

CNN news anchor JakeTapper's first question to US secretary of state Antony Blinken on his Sunday morning show captured the sense of how the rest of the United States was viewing President Joe Biden's recent decisions on Afghanistan: 'How did President Biden get this so wrong?'
As morning hour wore on and Al Jazeera news channel began running clips of Taliban fighters walking around inside the President Palace abandoned by former president Ashraf Ghani, Biden was facing similar questions from both supporters and critics, with varying degrees of outrage and frustration.

'This is going to be a stain on this president and this presidency,' said Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Relations Committee, on the same programme with Tapper. 'I think he is going to have blood on his hands for what they did.'

Ryan Crocker, who was president Barack Obama's ambassador to Afghanistan, could sense the impending disaster. 'I'm left with some grave questions in my mind about his ability to lead our nation as commander-in-chief,' Crocker told The Spokesman-Review, a Washington state publication, on Sunday morning, shortly before news came of the Taliban entering Kabul.

'To have read this so wrong - or, even worse, to have understood what was likely to happen and not care,' the former ambassador of the Obama-Biden administration added.

Biden did not issue any statement or posted a tweet all day. He was vacationing at the Camp David presidential retreat in the adjoining state of Maryland.

As questions began to be raise about where was the president at this critical juncture in the nation's history, the White House released a picture of him at a long table in a room with flags in a virtual conference with his national security team. Dressed in a casual T-shirt, he looked terribly alone.

'This morning, the president and vice-president met with their national security team and senior officials to hear updates on the drawdown of our civilian personnel in Afghanistan, evacuations of SIV (special immigration visa) applicants and other Afghan allies, and the ongoing security situation in Kabul,' the White House wrote in the tweet.

Barely a month ago, Biden has strenuously discounted any chance of the Taliban gaining early control of Kabul and the country. 'Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped - as well-equipped as any army in the world - and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable,' he had said on July 8 when asked if Taliban takeover was inevitable.

More recently, Biden has said he does not regret the decision to pull US forces out of Afghanistan ending a 'forever war', but as the Taliban advanced swiftly in recent days to take control of the country, he has sought to deflect some of the criticism of his own actions by pointing to the flawed deal he inherited from Trump.

'I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor - which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019 -that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on US forces,' Biden said, referring to a meeting that Trump had wanted to host at Camp David but did not.

Trump had also drawn down US forces to a 'a bare minimum of 2,500', Biden, said, adding, that when he took over as president, he had two choices 'follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our forces and our allies' forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country's civil conflict'.

Biden and his officials have since gone on to blame the 'hollow' response of the Afghan army and security forces and their inability to hold off the Taliban despite their numerical superiority and better American-supplied equipment.

'We would have been back at war with tens of thousands of troops having to go in because the 2,500 troops we had there and the air power would not have sufficed to deal with the situation, especially as we see, alas, the hollowness of the Afghan security forces,' Blinken said in the CNN interview.