The White House, on Sunday informed that President Joe Biden has met his national security team to discuss the security situation in Afghanistan.
The meeting also discussed counterterrorism operations, evacuation efforts, and intensive diplomatic efforts to finalise agreements with additional third-party country transit hubs. “This morning, the President met with his national security team to discuss the security situation in Afghanistan, counterterrorism operations, evacuation efforts, and intensive diplomatic efforts to finalize agreements with additional third-party country transit hubs,” the White House said in a tweet.
At a massive rally in Covid-19 hit Alabama, former US President Donald Trump ripped into his successor Joe Biden for the Kabul crisis, saying that recent developments in Afghanistan are a “major failure” of the current US administration’s foreign policy. Addressing a ‘Save America’ rally in Cullman, Trump on Saturday said that the situation in Afghanistan will go down as “one of the greatest embarrassments” and the “greatest foreign policy humiliation” in the history of the US, Sputnik reported. Trump’s rally comes despite Cullman City Council declared a state of emergency in the city due to the rising number of Covid-19 cases.
Trump accused Biden of surrendering the US military bases in Afghanistan, stressing that American troops are leaving behind $83 billion worth of military equipment. “This will go down as one of the great military defeats of all time,” Trump said, calling the troop withdrawal a “total surrender” and a “gross incompetence by a nation’s leader,” Trump emphasised that under his presidency, this would never have happened. The former President told the massive crowd gathered in the deep-red state that “this would have never happened if I was president.”
Former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday hit out at the US President Joe Biden for the current instability in Afghanistan and handling of the evacuation process from the country, calling it “a debacle of significant proportion”.
“Today, what President Biden said frankly made it worse. I didn’t hear a single thing from him today that would have given comfort to those families. There’s still no plan to get these Americans back. I didn’t hear a single thing that would give comfort to the very allies you spoke about,” The Hill quoted Pompeo as saying with Fox’s Sean Hannity on Friday.
“This is a debacle of significant proportions. We haven’t seen anything like this, the United States, in an awfully long time. America has the tools to fix this, our military could certainly figure out a way to go get these folks back and to destroy some of these billions of dollars in equipment that we left behind, but it’s going to take American resolve and leadership, and President Biden has refused to show this for the entire time,” he added.