European leaders point fingers at US after rapid fall of Kabul

Bloomberg

European leaders struggled to mask their frustration with President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw the last US soldiers from Afghanistan and sought to distance themselves from the dramatic scenes unfolding across the war-torn country.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters that the Nato mission in Afghanistan was “fundamentally dependent” on the US while French President Emmanuel Macron stressed that the Taliban took Kabul from the US-trained forces that Biden had backed in just “a matter of hours, with no resistance.”
“Nobody wants Afghanistan, once again, to be a breeding ground for terror,” UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, hours after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. “It’s fair to say the US decision to pull out has accelerated things.”
As members of Nato, the UK, France and Germany took part in the US-led coalition that toppled the Taliban after the September 11, 2001, attacks and maintained thousands of soldiers in Afghanistan for most of the last two decades to forge stability and train the Afghan army. They didn’t offer meaningful opposition to Donald Trump’s plan to end the US presence in the country, nor to Biden’s promise to follow through with it.
Yet after the militant group seized control of Kabul much faster than anyone predicted, the European leaders are now faced with the further unraveling of a key country in a volatile region that threatens a humanitarian and refugee crisis. Their challenge is to deflect blame without antagonizing Biden.
“This is an extremely bitter development. Bitter, dramatic, terrible — especially of course for the people in Afghanistan,” Merkel said in Berlin. “We all made the wrong assessment.”
Earlier on Monday at Kabul’s international airport, thousands of people rushed to try and leave the country. Though Taliban leaders are trying to portray a moderate stance, the fundamentalist group is talking about declaring a new “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” and there are reports it’s already curtailing the rights of women.

Johnson, who is chairing the Group of Seven industrialised nations this year, plans to hold a virtual summit of leaders to discuss the situation. He spoke with Macron and they agreed to work on a joint United Nations Security Council resolution. In his address, the French leader stressed the need for a common stance — on recognizing any future Afghan government and to prevent the kind of migration crisis that crippled the bloc in 2015. And he said he’d do everything he can to ensure Russia, the USand Europe respond with one voice. There isn’t much they can do now, though, to alter what’s happening on the ground.
The unexpected turn of events raises pressure on Macron ahead of April’s presidential election, in which he’s widely expected to seek a new mandate. It comes just weeks after he announced plans to cut the number of French troops in Africa’s Sahel region by about half, as he pushes ahead with plans to scale back his country’s largest and most expensive overseas operation.
In Germany, Merkel’s CDU-led bloc is in a tight race to retain control of Europe’s largest economy in elections in September and can ill afford echoes of issues that drove voters away in the past.
It wasn’t just European leaders arguing that the unfolding chaos isn’t their fault.
In a speech in Washington, Biden pointed to Afghanistan’s military and political leaders, saying they both lacked the will to fight. He implied that Ghani led the US astray with promises that were not kept.

Biden defends US exit from Afghanistan
Bloomberg

President Joe Biden offered a defiant defense of his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan as he addressed the nation, even as he acknowledged the “far from perfect” calamity that has become one of the biggest crises of his presidency.
“I stand squarely behind my decision,” Biden said as he addressed the nation from the East Room of the White House. “After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw US forces.”
Biden said the US would continue to fight terrorism in Afghanistan even after the pullback, what he said was an effort to show he was honouring his commitment to military personnel to end the war in Afghanistan.
The president faced criticism from both Republicans and Democrats. Both allies and opponents suggested his stubborn determination to withdraw American forces and disregard concerns that the Taliban was quickly advancing across Afghanistan had created a humanitarian disaster.

Images of panic and despair as Afghans crowded the Kabul airport – even clinging to US Air Force planes as they taxied down the runway – threatened to define Biden’s presidency and intensified pressure on the president to explain how his administration had misjudged conditions in the country.
Biden noted that former President Donald Trump had already drawn down the US presence in the country to a fraction of its previous size after reaching a deal with the Taliban last year in Qatar.
“The choice I had to make as your president was to follow through with that agreement, or to go back to be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season,” Biden said.
Biden also argued that a continued presence in Afghanistan “is not in our national security interest. It is not what the American people want.”
Biden also shifted some of the blame to the Afghans, who received years of training and billions of dollars in equipment. Nevertheless, the US could not provide Afghan security forces “the will to fight.”
“Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight,” Biden said. “If anything, the developments of the past week reinforce that ending US military involvement Afghanistan now was the right decision. We cannot and should not be fighting in a war, and dying in a war, that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”
The president laid out steps his administration was taking to deal with the crisis, including taking over air traffic control, ensuring the operation of civilian and military flights to evacuate thousands of Americans in the coming days, as well as ramping up assistance to Afghan citizens who are applying for asylum in the US.
The developments prompted widespread criticism of his administration’s handling of the troop drawdown the president announced earlier this year. Flights leaving the Kabul airport were temporarily halted amid security breaches, as Afghans desperate to escape the Taliban swarmed US military aircraft.
Biden had expressed confidence in those same security forces in recent weeks, predicting a calm and orderly withdrawal and dismissing questions about concerns within the intelligence community and military about the Taliban’s growing strength.
“Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to be nation-building,” Biden said.
Still, the president argued that the rapid deterioration of conditions in the country only underscored the futility of keeping American troops in a nation where an enduring military and civil society had failed to take root despite nearly two decades of US intervention and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars invested.