President Joe Biden on Tuesday was spinning faster than Hurricane Ida cutting through the Gulf of Mexico, as he maintained in a speech that America’s hasty, chaotic retreat from Afghanistan was an “extraordinary success” – and also former President Donald Trump’s fault.
“The bottom line is there is no evacuation from the end of the war that you can run without the complexities, challenges and threats we faced,” Biden said.
But a new report indicates that Biden’s arrogance and disconnect from the reality on the ground in Central Asia precluded necessary congressional oversight that possibly could have prevented the disastrous exit, the slaughter of 13 U.S troops in a terrorist attack and the stranding of at least 200 American citizens in Afghanistan.
The Washington Free Beacon noted on Tuesday that Biden unilaterally waived a provision of federal law that would have required him to reveal his exit strategy to Congress.
Biden inherited 2,500 troops in Afghanistan from Trump. Under federal law, if Biden sought to reduce that level to below 2,000, he was required to tell lawmakers the effect of a drawdown on U.S. counterterrorism operations in the region and the risk to American troops, the Free Beacon reported.
As the law states, such a briefing would have relayed the administration’s assessment of “ongoing U.S. counterterrorism mission against the Islamic State, al Qaeda, and associated forces; the risk to U.S. personnel in Afghanistan; and the risk for the expansion of existing or the formation of new international terrorist safe havens inside Afghanistan.”
The law mandated the Pentagon to also share details on “the threat posed by the Taliban and other terrorist organizations in Afghanistan,” as well as “the capacity of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces to effectively prevent or defend against attacks by the Taliban.”
Instead, Biden waived the requirement in June, asserting that telling Congress could undermine U.S. “national security interests.”
A month later he issued public assurances that the Afghan army could hold its own against the Taliban, and argued that an American pullout would not resemble the debacle of the U.S. exit from Vietnam.
Last month, however, Biden’s claims imploded, as the Taliban swept through the country in a matter of days, overran the Afghan military and fed conditions that ignited the deadly terrorist attack that killed 13 U.S. troops and nearly 200 Afghan citizens.
The Free Beacon noted that the State Department warned Biden in June, as he was dismissing the requirement to brief Congress, that the Taliban could demolish its military opposition.
Republican U.S. Rep. Claudia Tenney, a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, told the Free Beacon that Biden must be impeached for this failure.
“It is increasingly clear that President Biden never had a plan in place to safely withdraw from Afghanistan, so it is no surprise he never shared it with Congress like the law requires,” Tenney said.
“As we work to complete the critical mission of bringing every American and Afghan ally home, we must also be pressing for answers and accountability. I am calling on Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi to begin the impeachment process in the House immediately to determine how this crisis became such a catastrophe and to hold Biden accountable for his failure to lead.”
In that June letter to Congress that sidestepped the legal requirement to tell lawmakers the plan, Biden wrote, “Keeping thousands of troops concentrated on the ground in Afghanistan no longer makes sense as the most effective counterterrorism strategy when the threat has metastasized across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Our focus and posture need to adapt accordingly.”
“As we draw down United States troops, we will not take our eye off the terrorist threat in Afghanistan. The United States will reorganize our counterterrorism capabilities and assets in the region to prevent the re-emergence of a terrorist threat in Afghanistan,” Biden wrote. “We will hold the Taliban and the Afghan government accountable to their commitments not to allow terrorists to threaten the United States or its allies from Afghan soil. And we will refine our national strategy to monitor and disrupt terrorist threats wherever they arise.”
“We will withdraw responsibly, deliberately, and safely, in full coordination with our allies and partners,” he concluded.
“Our NATO allies and operational partners, who have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with us for almost 20 years and who have also made great sacrifices, will now withdraw alongside our forces as we stand by our enduring principle of ‘in together, out together.’”
Support journalism by clicking here to our GoFundMe or sign up for our free newsletter by clicking here
Android Users, Click Here To Download The Free Press App And Never Miss A Story. It’s Free And Coming To Apple Users Soon