President Joe Biden has come under intense fire in recent days from Republicans — including former president Donald Trump — over what the commander in chief admitted Monday has been a “messy” withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
But Biden officials are now pushing back — saying that the Trump administration left them no plan for exiting the country even though the former president signed an agreement with the Taliban at Doha in 2020 saying U.S. troops would leave by May.
According to Axios, one senior national security official in the Biden administration echoed criticisms from January of Trump’s failure to leave in place a plan for COVID-19 vaccine distribution.
“There was no plan to evacuate our diplomats to the airport,” the official said. “None of this was on the shelf, so to speak. When we got in, on Jan. 20, we saw that the cupboard was bare.”
Another offiical added: “The entire policy process had atrophied. It was really manifest here. On the one hand, they set a May deadline for withdrawal. On the other hand, there was no interagency planning on how to execute a withdrawal.”
Trump’s team reportedly was slow to brief the Biden administration on the terms of the Doha agreement during the transition. Trump also signed a secret agreement, after losing the election, saying the U.S. would leave Afghanistan before Biden took office.
“But after some Trump officials became aware of ‘an off-the-books operation by the commander in chief himself,’ they eventually persuaded Trump to keep some 2,500 troops in Afghanistan,” Axios reports.