Afghan President’s Nephew Says US Left Military Bases in the ‘Middle of the Night’: ‘Then They Expect the Afghans to Fight a War?’

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s nephew, Amel Ghani, said Wednesday he attributed blame for the Afghan government’s collapse to the way President Joe Biden handled America’s withdrawal from the country.

“They left in the peak fighting season of the Taliban,” Ghani said in an interview with Fox 35 Orlando’s Elina Shirazi. “They left several U.S. bases to the Afghan government in the middle of the night without leaving as far as a note to the Afghan government. And then they expect the Afghan government to go and fight a a war?”

Ghani, a 2018 graduate of American University in Washington, D.C., presently lives in the United States. His 72-year-old uncle served as Afghanistan’s president from 2014 until he was forced to flee to the United Arab Emirates last week after his country fell to Taliban militias. The former president hasn’t opined on his feelings about the American withdrawal since the Taliban took over. Ghani said he didn’t agree with his uncle’s decision to flee.

However, President Joe Biden’s handling of America’s withdrawal has been a subject of controversy domestically. U.S. Army Gen. Austin ‘Scott’ Miller, who was ordered to step down in July as the final commander of American forces in the region, objected to the move, saying at the time, “I don’t like leaving friends in need.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who served in Afghanistan as a U.S. infantry officer, cited Miller’s removal as evidence Biden had “pulled the rug out from the Afghan army.”

“We trained the Afghan army to fight with air support,” Cotton told Fox News on Monday. “They weren’t fighting with American helicopters. They weren’t even fighting with American troopers supporting them. But they were fighting with Western contractors doing basic things like refueling and maintenance operations. Biden insisted all the contractors come out as well. … We shouldn’t be surprised when we train them to fight one way and we prevent them from fighting that way that they got overrun by the Taliban.”

Ghani said Thursday that after the collapse of Afghanistan’s government and military, he did not believe the country’s residents would view removing the Taliban as a priority. “I think peace is at the top of everybody’s agenda,” he said. “I mean, the last 50 years, the war has been going from one government to the other government.”

Watch above via Fox 35.