Former President Donald Trump has slammed President Biden for the deadly terrorist attacks at the Kabul airport that killed more than 100 people, including 13 U.S. service members.
Mr. Trump said the attack would not have happened on his watch.
“This tragedy should never have taken place,” Mr. Trump said in a prerecorded video statement Thursday. “It should not have happened, and it would not have happened if I were your president.”
The former president also offered condolences to the service members who lost lives in the attack and thanked those who served in the war over the two decades.
“Every American who served in Afghanistan has made tremendous sacrifices for our country,” Mr. Trump said. “On behalf of your fellow citizens, I want you to know that those sacrifices were not made in vain.”
Mr. Trump has been highly critical of Mr. Biden’s troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. At a rally Saturday, he called the unfolding exit “the greater foreign policy humiliation in the history of the United States of America.”
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Mr. Trump campaigned on a commitment to bring troops home from the two-decade war in Afghanistan. He signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February of 2020 and withdrew thousands of troops from the country, though stopped short of a full withdrawal as the Taliban violated several terms of the agreement.
Mr. Biden has said that the deal Mr. Trump reached with the Taliban left him with little choice but to withdrawal troops, a claim he continued to press in his address following the attacks on Thursday.
“Imagine where we’d be if I had indicated, on May the 1st, I was not going to renegotiate an evacuation date; we were going to stay there,” Mr. Biden said. “I’d have only one alternative: Pour thousands of more troops back into Afghanistan to fight a war that we had already won, relative [to] the reason we went in the first place.”
Mr. Biden has faced growing criticism over the exit from lawmakers from both parties that intensified following Thursday’s deadly attacks.
• Joseph Clark can be reached at jclark@washingtontimes.com.
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