Social media has been steadily exposing the lies of the US administration with regard to the situation in Afghanistan. US President Joe Biden admitted in an interview to ABC News that he had no idea as to how the situation in Afghanistan could have been handled better than how he did it. However, there are a lot of questions that the US needs to answer.

Details revealed by those in the midst of the action indicate that the US not only grossly miscalculated the situation in Afghanistan but that it was also lying all along. Requests had been made to Biden ever since he took office to evacuate those involved in the war efforts which seems to have fallen on deaf ears.

National Review quotes Afghanistan war veteran Matt Zeller who said he had approached US President ever since he took office to step up efforts to rescue several Afghans who had aided Americans in the war against the Taliban. Zeller says:

“I have been personally trying to tell this administration since it took office . . .  that this was coming,” said Zeller, co-founder of the nonprofit No One Left Behind, an organization dedicated to helping former Afghan interpreters. “Nobody listened to us. They didn’t plan for the evacuation of our Afghan wartime allies. They’re trying to conduct it now at the eleventh hour.

There is no doubt that the US has botched its Afghan exit and has been drawing wide criticism for the same. Pundits recently used the phrase “Saigon moment” to describe what was unfolding in Kabul, where photographers captured images of a Chinook helicopter flying near the U.S. embassy amid a hasty evacuation ahead of the Taliban’s complete takeover of the city.

The photos were eerily similar to scenes from the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War, when the United States hurried to airlift the last of its personnel and some Vietnamese from the roof of its embassy in late April 1975, a moment widely believed to be a symbol of Washington’s failings in the Southeast Asian country.

In a defensive position, senior US officials have sought to reject such a comparison and claimed that the country has achieved its mission in the Afghan war.

Speaking from the White House on Monday, US President Joe Biden alleged “our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building,” while acknowledging that the situation in the country “did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.”

Some allies are also lashing out at the United States over the Afghan debacle, as they have been left scrambling to get their nationals out of the country.

The decision was “ultimately made by the Americans” and “domestic political reasons” were partly to blame, German Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly said on Monday.

Peter Ricketts, Britain’s former national security adviser, tweeted that the United States’ “unilateralism over their withdrawal has done real damage to” the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance.

Richard Haass, president of the US think-tank, Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on Twitter that he believes “the grim aftermath of America’s strategic and moral failure will reinforce questions about US reliability among friends and foes far and wide”.

The criticism isn’t unfounded particularly as it has come to light that the Biden administration halted a Trump-era critical response program aimed at providing swift and safe evacuations of Americans out of crisis zones just months prior to the fall of Kabul.

The National Pulse says the decision to pause the program may have come as early as February, both undermining the original Trump-era date for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, and certainly giving the Taliban time to threaten American assets and lives on the run-up to Joe Biden’s September 11th date of withdrawal.

The National Pulse also understands no Congressional notification was sent to the United States Congress, as is required, upon the pause. On August 15th, Biden’s State Department was forced to issue a humiliating statement warning U.S. citizens that the Embassy in Kabul would be unresponsive to their requests for help.

(With IANS inputs)

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