Over the past six weeks, we've all watched with a mixture of bemusement and horror as Kamala Harris has continued to try to completely erase or obfuscate her record and the various policy positions she's claimed to hold from time to time. These efforts have included flip-flops on everything from the border wall to a ban on plastic straws. But when it comes to her role while serving as Vice President under Joe Biden, there are some elephants in the room that are simply too large and too ugly to ignore. Chief among these was the disastrous and deadly decision to fully withdraw from Afghanistan in September of 2021. What could Harris possibly say about that debacle at this point to deflect criticism? As it turns out, even her handlers couldn't find a way to paint any lipstick on that pig, so Kamala fell back on the one reliable answer that she and Joe Biden have gone to whenever anything became uncomfortable. They decided to blame Trump. That's right. As Breitbart pointed out this weekend, she is seriously attempting to pin the blame on Donald Trump for something that happened nearly nine months after he left office.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign tried to blame her and President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan on former President Donald Trump — even though it happened seven months after he left office.The Harris-Walz campaign released a statement Friday that claimed, “Trump left the Biden-Harris Administration with zero plans for an orderly withdrawal — only a dangerous, costly mess.”Trump had begun negotiations with the Taliban and reached a deal, but it had not been completed by the time he left office in January 2020. Biden — against the advice of his military advisers — decided to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan in September 2021, which prompted the Taliban to sweep into Kabul at the end of August 2021 and topple the U.S.-backed government in a surprise rout.
The sheer, unadulterated nerve of these people is infuriating. First of all, few sane people were arguing against getting out of Afghanistan. That was long overdue. It's also true that Trump had been in negotiations with the Taliban (for better or worse) because there was nobody else to deal with. But those negotiations had stalled and the plans were not finalized. In the Harris campaign's own words, they claimed that the plan was debated and they "went with Biden's plan."
Even as the withdrawal was underway, I was only one of many who noted with horror that the worst possible decision that was made was to empty and shut down Bagram Air Base. That was not part of Trump's plan. We could have held that base for a couple of more years, evacuating our own personnel and our helpers there and shipping them out of the country. Instead, we gave the base away and forced our people to try to defend a makeshift base at the Kabul airport, leading to the massive bloodshed that ensued. To this day, Biden and his top military advisers have never expressed any regrets over that decision or expressed any remorse. Of course, Joe Biden was also the person seen checking his watch during the Dignified Transfer of Remains.
Kamala Harris really seems to believe that she can whitewash herself out of that picture despite all of the evidence to the contrary. She has repeatedly bragged about being "the last person in the room" when Biden made the decision to pull out in that fashion. If she wants to take credit for being that influential in the process, then she needs to stand up and accept responsibility for the results as well. And the results were nothing short of horrific.
The "blame Trump" card can only be played so far before even your most loyal supporters are going to start edging away from you. This isn't just offensive to the sensibilities of all the Americans who were horrified by what unfolded during that withdrawal. It's patently offensive to the Gold Star families that now live with the memory of what went so tragically wrong at Abbey Gate. The Department of Defense released a whitewashed summary of those events earlier this year, declaring simply that a lone ISIS-K bomber carried out the attack and it "could not have been preventable at the tactical level." Of course, that's not true because it would have been fully preventable if all of those people were at Bagram and not at the Kabul airport. This is one issue that should not be tainted with politics. This was a disaster and it was one of our own making. Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris need to be held accountable for the travesty that followed those decisions.
