Blinken Blames Trump on Afghanistan — ‘We Inherited a Deadline’

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the Biden administration had to abide by the deal struck by President Donald Trump on a 2021 withdrawal when pressed on the disastrous evacuation of U.S. personnel from the U.S. embassy in Kabul.

Anchor Chuck Todd said, “There’s a lot of back seat driving on this. Why do this in the summer? Fighting in Afghanistan is seasonal. Why not delay the withdrawal to the winter and give the Afghan security forces a chance when we know the Taliban retreats in the winter? The idea that you accept a bad deal by Trump, but you’ll turn back other bad deals by Trump, I mean what was wrong with delays six months?”

Blinken said, “Because we inherited a deadline negotiated by the previous administration. That deadline was May 1st. The idea that we could have maintained the status quo beyond May 1st if the president decided to stay, I think, is a fiction. Here is what is likely to have happened had the president decided to do that. During the time from when the agreement was reached to May 1st, the Taliban had stopped attacking our forces, stopped attacking NATO forces. It had not sought to take over the entire country by going at these major provincial capitals. Come May 2nd. If the president decided to stay, all gloves would have been off. We would have been back at war with the Taliban attacking our forces. We would have had about 2500 forces in, counted with air power. That would not have been sufficient to deal with the situation. I would be on your show right now explaining why we were sending ten of thousands of troops back in Afghanistan restarting a war we need to end.”

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