Jake Tapper Rips Biden’s ‘Insulting’ Rejection of Army Report on Afghanistan Withdrawal: An ‘Obvious Failure’ That ‘Cost Lives’
CNN’s Jake Tapper ripped President Joe Biden’s response to the U.S. Army’s new report on the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
During Sunday’s edition of CNN’s State of the Union, the anchor weighed in on NBC’s interview between Biden and Lester Holt, which will air in full shortly before the Super Bowl. A preview excerpt shows Biden defending his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan last year, but it also shows him rebuking a U.S. Army report illustrating numerous ways in which the withdrawal went wrong.
Biden denied the report’s details about military officials warning that the administration was ignoring security threats before the fall of Kabul, and U.S. Embassy officials were in denial of the situation’s decline. Tapper noted Biden’s response as he outlined the report’s claims about the administration’s inadequate preparations for withdrawal and the lack of urgency even as the Taliban took control of the country.
On Biden’s emphatic denial of the report, Tapper said “it’s difficult to overstate how insulting Biden’s sweeping rejection is to so many service members and veterans, given the full content of the 2,000 pages of documents in this U.S. Army investigation.” Tapper added that the report is backed up by the accounts of servicemen and women who worked with the 13 American military members killed during the suicide bombing of Hamid Karzai International Airport.
I don’t doubt President Biden cares, but I do not understand why he would not manifest that care into taking this investigation more seriously? Absorbing the tragic details, contemplating the obvious failures of his administration. Failures that cost lives. Biden always bristles at this because he feels confident that ending the war in Afghanistan was the right decion, but that’s not the question at hand. It’s not whether, but how, the war ended. And what that means to the people who were there when it did finally end? No part of these military interviews ring true because ‘that’s not what I was told?’ If that’s was not what you were told, then what was? And don’t you have an obligation, sir, to be told?
Watch above, via CNN.
