In rare political remarksthis week, former PresidentGeorge W. Bushinsisted in an interview that he believes the Biden administration’s draw-down of U.S. forces in Afghanistan will have “unbelievably bad” consequences.
Bush, citing the progress that he said has been made among women and young girls in Afghanistan due to the presence of U.S. troops, told Deutsche Welle: “It’s unbelievable how that society changed from the brutality of the Taliban. And now all of a sudden, sadly, I’m afraid Afghan women and girls are going to suffer unspeakable harm.”
“You know, I think it is,” said Bush, 74, when asked if the withdrawal was a mistake. “Yeah, because I think the consequences are going to be unbelievably bad. And I’m sad. Laura and I spent a lot of time with Afghan women. And they’re scared.”
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Some observers, however, have echoed Bush in being more wary of an exit and its consequences even as Biden says an ongoing engagement doesn’t serve the country.
“The United States did what we went to do in Afghanistan: to get the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 and to deliver justice to Osama Bin Laden, and to degrade the terrorist threat to keep Afghanistan from becoming a base from which attacks could be continued against the United States,” Biden, 78, said in a briefing to announce the details of the draw-down. “We achieved those objectives. That’s why we went.”
Biden continued: “We did not go to Afghanistan to nation-build. And it’s the right and the responsibility of the Afghan people alone to decide their future and how they want to run their country.”
In a tweet on Wednesday, Mike Walker, a top Army official in the Clinton White House, wrote of Bush’s reaction: “Of course, [he] forgets we have been in Afghanistan for 20 years because he looked the other way in 2003 and invaded Iraq before the job was done in Afghanistan.”
The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 took place roughly one month after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and aimed to dismantle al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban from power.
“It could happen, but it is tough,” Biden said ina March interview with ABC News. “The fact is that, that was not a very solidly negotiated deal that [Trump] … worked out.”
Since leaving office in 2009, Bush has been reluctant to comment on his successors, save for a few instances as when he spoke out about thedeadly pro-Trump attackat the U.S. Capitol in January and remarked in an April episode ofTodaythat some in the contemporary Republican Party are “isolationist, protectionist and, to a certain extent, nativist.”
source: people.com
