Monday’s federal holiday honoring America’s fallen service members came a day after Biden and Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached final agreement on a deal that would raise America’s debt limit and that now awaits approval by Congress.Īs it stands, the agreement would keep nondefense spending roughly flat in the 2024 fiscal year and increase it by 1% the following year. The military believes it can move out 5,000 people a day if things go to plan.”Every year we remember,” he said. By nightfall, after the airfield was cleared, flight operations began again in Kabul. “Our focus right now is to maintain security at (the airport), to continue to expedite flight operations while safeguarding Americans and Afghan civilians,” he said. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon that more than 700 special immigrant visa applicants have departed Afghanistan in the past 48 hours, bringing the total to nearly 2,000. Major General Hank Taylor, director of current operations on the U.S. is now trying to evacuate tens of thousands of Afghans and their families who might face retribution if they were left behind. The UN said Kabul residents are reporting that Taliban have begun house-to-house searches in some neighborhoods, registering names and “looking for people in their target list.” The U.S. “Biden did a lot of finger-pointing but it was his indefensible decisions and failure to prepare that have created the security and humanitarian crisis currently unfolding,” Rogers said in a statement. Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, said the President’s speech did not match the reality of the situation on the ground. ”After May 1, there was only a cold reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces,” Biden said, “or escalating the conflict and sending thousands of more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan lurching into the third decade of conflict.” Yet Biden already had altered the terms of that deal, deciding that all American and allied forces should withdraw from Afghanistan by September 11, the fateful date which led to the U.S. The President also said he was bound by the Trump Administration’s badly negotiated peace deal with the Taliban, which set a timetable for withdrawal. He did not mention that those forces were reportedly going unpaid and were hamstrung by the absence of American troops, aircraft and heavy weapons from strategic locations they had occupied for nearly two decades. “Americans cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves,” he said. “We could not provide them with the will to fight for their future,” he said. The Taliban’s rapid and decisive victory over Afghan forces was the fault of Afghans themselves, Biden said. While Biden did acknowledge the collapse of Afghanistan’s government occurred more quickly than his government had anticipated, he failed to explain how just five weeks ago he had stood in the very same room in the White House and confidently predicted the unlikelihood of a complete Taliban takeover. He chose instead to explain why he made his decision to wind down America’s longest war, a policy that the last three U.S. Yet Biden did not acknowledge any of these heart-wrenching scenes. Another video showed gruesome footage of what appeared to be an individual falling from a plane as it took off. military C-17 cargo jet as it lumbered down the runway. Dozens of Afghans could be seen clinging to the undercarriage of a hulking U.S. In the hours before Biden returned from Camp David to speak at the White House, images emerged on social media depicting desperate crowds of people packed on the tarmac of the Kabul airport, which has become the sole means of escape since the Taliban encircled the capital and cut off routes in and out of the city. “Then, all of a sudden, you have this catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan and you wonder how, in the context of a presidency that has been so well thought out from the beginning, that this catastrophic end to our presence in Afghanistan could have occurred.” “This is the most damaging thing that has happened in his presidency,” says Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the nonpartisan White House Transition Project, who noted the methodical way Biden has conducted himself in his first seven months on the job.
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