RASC News Agency: Donald Trump, the former U.S. president and current Republican frontrunner, stated that he intended for the United States to withdraw from Afghanistan “with honor and strength.” Trump claimed that, had he remained in power, the Taliban would never have been able to stage military parades using American equipment left behind during the withdrawal. Speaking on Monday, December 16, at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, Trump once again criticized President Joe Biden’s handling of Afghanistan and Ukraine. Reflecting on his time in office, Trump told reporters: “If I were still president, the Taliban would never have paraded with our military equipment, because I would have ensured that every last piece of it was removed from Afghanistan.”
He continued: “We rebuilt our military, yet a significant portion of our equipment was foolishly abandoned in Afghanistan. In my view, this display of incompetence was one of the reasons Putin decided to invade Ukraine he saw the sheer weakness and ineptitude of this administration (Biden’s).” Trump underscored that under his leadership, the United States would have extracted “every nut and bolt” of its military assets from Afghanistan, leaving no equipment for adversaries to exploit. The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has been a consistent target of criticism from American politicians, particularly Republican lawmakers. Just last week, the House Foreign Affairs Committee summoned Secretary of State Antony Blinken to testify about the chaotic nature of the Biden administration’s exit strategy.
While defending the withdrawal decision, Blinken admitted: “The final chapter of Afghanistan has yet to be written.” Critics have argued that the United States not only left behind valuable military hardware but also provided the Taliban with millions of dollars on a weekly basis. Observers contend that what has sustained the Taliban’s grip on power is not merely the military equipment left behind but the billions of dollars transferred to the group under various pretexts.
