Former President Donald Trump called on President Joe Biden Sunday to reconsider extending the United States’ deadline for a full withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“I wish Joe Biden wouldn’t use September 11th as the date to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan, for two reasons. First, we can and should get out earlier. Nineteen years is enough, in fact, far too much and way too long,” the 45th president wrote. “I made early withdraw possible by already pulling much of our billions of dollars of equipment out and, more importantly, reducing our military presence to less than 2,000 troops from the 16,000 level that was there (likewise in Iraq, and zero troops in Syria except for the area where we KEPT THE OIL).” (RELATED: Biden Extends Trump’s May Afghanistan Withdrawal Deadline To September 11, 2021)
WASHINGTON, DC – FEBRUARY 02: U.S. President Joe Biden makes brief remarks before signing several executive orders directing immigration actions for his administration in the Oval Office at the White House on February 02, 2021 in Washington, DC. The orders will aim to reunite migrant families that were separated at the U.S.-Mexico border and authorize a wholesale review of former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. (Photo by Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images)
“Secondly, September 11th represents a very sad event and period for our Country and should remain a day of reflection and remembrance honoring those great souls we lost,” Trump continued. “Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do. I planned to withdraw on May 1st, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible.”
Biden officially announced the new Afghanistan timeline on April 13 after weeks of consistently stating the difficulty of meeting the May 1 withdrawal deadline set by Trump.
“We cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan hoping to create the ideal conditions for our withdrawal, expecting a different result,” Biden said in a nationally televised address. “I am now the fourth American president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan. Two Republicans. Two Democrats. I will not pass this responsibility to a fifth.”
Both Trump and Obama campaigned heavily on ending the war in Afghanistan, and Biden even pledged during his 2012 vice presidential debate with Paul Ryan that all U.S. troops would exit the country by 2014.
“It’s their responsibility to take over their own security. That’s why with 49 of our allies in Afghanistan, we’ve agreed on a gradual draw-down so we’re out of there, by the year, in the year 2014,” Biden said at the time. “We went there for one reason, to get those people who killed Americans, Al-Qaeda. We decimated Al-Qaeda central, we have eliminated Osama Bin Laden, that was our purpose.”
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