TrumpBiden
© Chicago Tribune/AP/Hoshang/Otago Daily Times/KJNFormer US President Donald Trump • US President Joe Biden • US Troops in Afghanistan
Former President Donald Trump slammed Democrat President Joe Biden in a statement on Saturday as the situation in Afghanistan continues to rapidly deteriorate, saying that Biden did not follow the plan put in place by the Trump administration and that the entire situation was a "disgrace."

Trump's statement comes as Biden tried to deflect responsibility for his own actions by blaming Trump for the situation in a statement on Saturday. Experts quickly pushed back on Biden's attempts to deflect blame, calling it "pathetic" and saying that "he owns all of this."

In a statement, Trump said:
"Joe Biden gets it wrong every time on foreign policy, and many other issues. Everyone knew he couldn't handle the pressure. Even Obama's Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, said as much. He ran out of Afghanistan instead of following the plan our Administration left for him — a plan that protected our people and our property, and ensured the Taliban would never dream of taking our Embassy or providing a base for new attacks against America. The withdrawal would be guided by facts on the ground.

"After I took out ISIS, I established a credible deterrent. That deterrent is now gone. The Taliban no longer has fear or respect for America, or America's power. What a disgrace it will be when the Taliban raises their flag over America's Embassy in Kabul. This is complete failure through weakness, incompetence, and total strategic incoherence."
Trump's statement is backed up by what Mike Pompeo, the former director of the CIA and secretary of state, said in an interview last week about the matter:
"I don't know exactly what they are doing, but we had conditions attached to how we were thinking about this withdrawal — I was part of those negotiations," Pompeo said. "I was also in the room when President Trump made very clear to Mullah Baradar, the senior Taliban negotiator, that if you threatened an American, if you scared an American, certainly if you hurt an American, that we would bring all American power to bear to make sure that we went to your village, to your house. We were very clear about the things we were prepared to do to protect American lives. And indeed, since we began those negotiations back in February of 2020, there wasn't a single American killed by the Taliban. We had established a deterrence model."
David Adesnik, Senior Fellow and Director of Research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), noted in FDD's bimonthly Biden administration foreign policy tracker that
"even though, as vice president, Joe Biden saw how the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq led to the rise of the Islamic State as well as tremendous suffering for the Iraqi people, he appears not to have prepared for similar risks in Afghanistan."
Bill Roggio, Senior Fellow and Editor of FDD's Long War Journal, noted the stunning collapse of Afghanistan under the Biden administration:
The Taliban seized control of six provincial capitals in just four days: Aybak, Taloqan, Kunduz City, Sar-i-Pul City, Shibirghan, and Zaranj. Zaranj, the capital of Nimruz province, was the first provincial capital taken by the Taliban since they began their offensive on May 1. The Taliban have launched a string of attacks on other major cities, including Lashkar Gah, which is in danger of falling, as well as Herat City and Kandahar City. In Kabul, the Taliban launched a suicide assault against the acting defense minister's home and assassinated the director of the Afghan government's information and media center. Despite the Taliban's clear implementation of a military strategy to re-establish their Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the U.S. State Department still clings to the notion that there can be a negotiated settlement.