Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) described the Biden administration’s report on the Afghanistan withdrawal as “a political whitewash.”
Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Graham blasted the 12-page summary report that blamed problems on the Trump administration, claiming that it hampered the withdrawal efforts. He accused the Biden administration of deflecting, adding that its weak pull-out exposed America to terror threats.
“This report is a political whitewash by the Biden administration to shift blame,” said Graham. “The report says that our mission had been accomplished and that’s why Biden got out of Afghanistan. He’s claiming that we eradicated all terrorist threats in Afghanistan; that’s why he withdrew to end the longest war [in American history].”
“General [Michael] Kurilla said last week — who’s the head of CENTCOM — that the rise of ISIS-K and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is so severe we could be attacked in America in the next six months without warning. So when the Biden administration tells you there are no terrorists in Afghanistan, they are lying. There’s a lethal cocktail forming, rise of terrorism, Afghanistan, a broken border here in the United States. It’s only a matter of time until there’s another 9/11 if we don’t change policies. My view of what happened in Afghanistan by Biden was he paved the way for another 9/11.”
WATCH: @LindseyGrahamSC joins @ShannonBream to give his thoughts on direct U.S. involvement in Taiwan, Mexico’s role in the fentanyl crisis, and the GOP’s platform on abortion. #FoxNewsSunday pic.twitter.com/VcPW2LRmjc
— Fox News Sunday (@FoxNewsSunday) April 9, 2023
The Biden administration released its report on Thursday, claiming Biden supported the withdrawal from the moment he took office.
“When he came into office, President Biden believed the right thing for the country was to end the longest war in American history and bring American troops home,” the report stated. “As he laid out to the American people, after twenty years, the United States had accomplished its mission in Afghanistan: to remove from the battlefield the terrorists who attacked the United States on 9/11, including Osama bin Laden, and degrade the terrorist threat to the United States.”
“President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor,” the report claimed, citing the Trump administration’s troop drawdowns and negotiations directly with the Taliban, including the May 2021 deadline to withdraw from Afghanistan.
“During the transition from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration, the outgoing Administration provided no plans for how to conduct the final withdrawal or to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies,” the report continued. “Indeed, there were no such plans in place when President Biden came into office, even with the agreed upon full withdrawal just over three months away. As a result, when President Biden took office on January 20, 2021, the Taliban were in the strongest military position that they had been in since 2001, controlling or contesting nearly half of the country.”
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“At the same time, the United States had only 2,500 troops on the ground—the lowest number of troops in Afghanistan since 2001—and President Biden was facing President Trump’s near-term deadline to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by May 2021, or the Taliban would resume its attacks on U.S. and allied troops.”
