CLAIM: President Joe Biden claimed that his predecessor and rival Donald Trump “didn’t do anything” to address the two-decade-old Afghan War while in office during Thursday night’s presidential debate.
Responding to a question on the economy during Thursday’s debate on CNN, Biden abruptly pivoted to the Afghan War, claiming that, when Trump was president, “they were still killing people in Afghanistan,” presumably referring to U.S. troops.
“He [Trump] didn’t do anything about that,” Biden said. “When he was president, we still found ourselves in a position where you had a notion that we were this safe country. The truth is I am the only president this century that doesn’t have any, this decade, that doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world like he did.”
Trump responded by reminding Biden that he was, in fact, negotiating an exit from the war.
“I was getting out of Afghanistan but we were getting out with dignity, with strength, with power – he got out, it was the most embarrassing day in our country’s life,” Trump said.
VERDICT: False
Both Biden’s claim that President Trump did not act to end the Afghan war and his assertion that the Biden administration “doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world” are verifiably false.
The Trump administration prioritized ending the Afghan War. Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo engaged in extensive negotiations with the Taliban, hosted by the nation of Qatar, that resulted in a deal in which the U.S. government agreed to withdraw from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, in exchange for the Taliban not attacking Americans and cutting ties to jihadist terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda.
President Biden broke the deal, announcing in April 2021 that he would prolong the war – confusingly referring to his decision as a “withdrawal” – from the April deadline to September 11, 2021.
The Taliban responded to the rupture of the deal by stating that they would no longer abide by their promises and launching a campaign of terrorism consisting of over 22,000 attacks on Afghan troops between March and July 2021. The attacks were overwhelmingly successful, sending Afghan soldiers fleeing across the borders of the country to neighboring states and ultimately ending in the destruction of the official Afghan armed forces. On August 15, 2021 – a little less than a month before Biden’s deadline – Taliban leaders surrounded the national capital, Kabul, sending then-President Ashraf Ghani fleeing.
The Taliban has governed Afghanistan uncontested since.
The claim that Biden has not overseen the death of U.S. troops is also false. In Afghanistan, days after the fall of Kabul, 13 U.S. servicemen and women died in the bombing of the Kabul international airport. More recently, America lost three soldiers in a jihadist attack on the Syrian-Jordanian border.
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