President Joe Biden is insisting that he made the right decisions on the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, despite the deaths of 13 service members during a suicide bombing outside the Kabul airport as the evacuations were taking place, according to a new book.
"No one offered to resign, in large part because the president didn't believe anyone had made a mistake," Politico's Alexander Ward wrote in "The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore Foreign Policy After Trump," reported Axios. "Ending the war was always going to be messy."
After the withdrawal, Biden told his top aides, including national security adviser Jake Sullivan, that he "stood by them and they had done their best during a tough situation," Ward wrote, quoting an unnamed White House official. "There wasn't even a real possibility of a shake-up."
The book examined the tensions between the State and Defense departments before the withdrawal, with Biden being more partial to State and wary of Defense.
Part of Biden's skepticism of the Pentagon had grown after the Obama administration's discussions about a surge in troops in Afghanistan, Ward said.
The now-president believed the Pentagon had trapped Obama politically, and in April 2021, after Biden ordered the withdrawal, both sides fought over how to get troops out.
The Pentagon and the State Department fought during a May 8, 2021, rehearsal for the evacuation operation, with the Defense Department arguing that it would be too dangerous to keep the embassy open in Kabul.
Ward also surmised that while the chaos was unfolding at the Kabul airport while the Taliban-aligned forces were taking over the capital, Biden knew he was making promises he could not keep, including on Aug. 18, 2021, when he told ABC News he promised to keep troops in Afghanistan until all U.S. citizens who wanted to leave could get out of the country.
"There's no one here who thinks we can meet that promise," a senior White House official told Ward at the time.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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