The Taliban seized Afghanistan with unexpected speed as the US withdrew troops.
The troop pullout happened under Biden but came from a deal negotiated by Trump.
UK Defense Minister Ben Wallace on Monday blamed the Afghanistan crisis on Trump.
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The UK's defense minister blamed the chaos in Afghanistan on former US President Donald Trump on Monday.
The Taliban seized Kabul and declared a new government on Sunday, after taking over most of the rest of the country with unexpected speed as US forces withdrew after 20 years.
The withdrawal came after a conditional peace deal negotiated by then-President Trump in 2020 that mentioned the withdrawal of US and NATO forces.
Current President Joe Biden has largely upheld that deal. Biden said he trusted Afghan forces and said the US could not justify remaining in the country after 20 years.
Biden could end up shouldering much of the blame for what's to come: Many Afghans who helped US forces were still stranded in Afghanistan and fear Taliban punishment.
But UK Defense Minister Ben Wallace has pointed the finger at Trump.
He told "BBC Breakfast" on Monday: "The die was cast when the deal was done by Donald Trump, if you want my observation."
"President Biden inherited a momentum, a momentum that had been given to the Taliban because they felt they had now won. He'd also inherited a momentum of troop withdrawal from the international community, the US."
"So I think in that sense, the seeds of what we're seeing today were before President Biden took office. The seeds were a peace deal that was [effectively] rushed, that wasn't done in collaboration properly with the international community and then a dividend taken out incredibly quickly."
He had previously called Trump's deal "rotten" and said the international community would likely "pay the consequences."
40diets on August 16th, 2021 at 14:40 UTC »
Didn’t trump attempt to invite the Taliban to the Whitehouse
believeblackbodies on August 16th, 2021 at 14:21 UTC »
Not sure what he was expecting? Was he hoping if we stayed another 5 years the corrupt Afghan government would be able to stand on their own? Fuck it, the die was cast in 2001. Pull the bandaid off now and never get involved in a foreign war like this again.
kor_hookmaster on August 16th, 2021 at 13:29 UTC »
Quite frankly, every administration since 2001 has some blood on their hands with regards to Afghanistan.
Trump inherited a no-win situation from Obama, who in turn inherited it from Bush.
Back in 2001-2002 people were warning that nation-building in Afghanistan would be a colossal clusterfuck, but they were shouted down as being either unpatriotic or supportive of terrorists.
That's not to say Trump (or Obama, for that matter) are devoid of blame, but really the problem belongs to the neoconservatives under Bush who thought that using the US military to nation-build was a good idea - despite numerous real-life examples proving that it just led to endless quagmires.
What's even more egregious is that the neoconservative architects of this mess almost all lived through Vietnam - and apparently learned literally nothing from the experience. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bremer, and others all saw what happened when America tried to fight an insurgency in a culturally distinct and diverse country - it's bound to fail.
The stupidity goes back even further to when the US supported the Mujahideen against the Soviets, giving them massive funds and modern weapons.
Bottom line is that the US military is trained to fight wars, not to defeat insurgencies, build nations, or found democracies. The modern Afghanistan is the result of 40 years of failed American foreign policy.