Biden still refuses to take responsibility for the disaster during the withdrawal from Afghanistan. It would seem that he doesn’t really care. Now, in another deflective approach, a new report from the White House holds Donald Trump responsible for something that actuallyhappened eight months after Biden took office.

NTB reported on this yesterday, as if it were completely normal news.

Joe Biden’s opportunities to influence the outcome were “significantly limited by the conditions” created under President Donald Trump, says the report, which was created after a review led by the US National Security Council.

The “conditions” Trump created were through an agreement signed with the Taliban in February 2020, in which the United States committed to withdrawing all its forces from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021.

The outgoing Trump administration had given the Biden administration a date for withdrawal, but no plan to implement it. And after four years of indifference – and in some cases deliberate humiliation – essential systems, offices and functions that would have been necessary for a safe and orderly exit, had fallen into disrepair, the report states.

The report comes at an appropriate time, just before the Easter holiday, while virtually all the media were mainly focused on the indictment against Donald Trump. However, the Wall Street Journal does not believe that Americans will be fooled by this short report.

Americans are unlikely to fall for the 12 pages of narrative gaslighting and the buck for that dark episode stops with President Biden.

Joe Biden is not upset about America’s withdrawal and the White House is trying to portray chaos and disaster as a triumph, the WSJ believes.

Mr. Biden “believed the right thing for the country” was withdrawing all U.S. forces.

The criticism is of course not about the withdrawal per se, the Americans are tired of endless wars without aim and meaning. Of course, it was how the forces were withdrawn that created the reactions, all of the lives lost and the strange decision to leave $85 billion worth of military equipment in the hands of the Taliban.

Blaming Trump is of course completely pointless. Trump wanted to withdraw the forces from Afghanistan and would probably have carried this out if he had remained in office.

But Biden didn’t go to the polls to lead Trump’s policies, did he? After all, Biden was supposed to be the “adult” in the White House. He spent only one day destroying America’s position as a self-sufficient energy nation. Surely then he should have enough time to prepare a new plan for Afghanistan in 8 months?

Moreover, Biden had no obligations to honour the agreement with the Taliban as the Taliban had repeatedly violated their part of the agreement.

Biden could well have left a smaller force behind, among other things to guard the enormous amount of weaponry at Bagram Air Base and to ensure that all important allies got out of the country safely.

Many of Mr. Biden’s advisers tried to tell him as much, including U.S. military general officers and European allies, who preferred a residual force of a few thousand allied troops.

It was Biden’s decisions that led to the chaos in Afghanistan. He also withdrew air support and the maintenance of the equipment of the Afghan forces who were supposed to defend Kabul against the Taliban.

That the Biden regime withdrew its forces from Bagram Air Base was a self-inflicted strategic mistake, according to another report from the Senate last year.

Afghan allies literally woke up one morning at Bagram to find U.S. troops had gone.

More alarming than this twisted story is that the White House lacks the ability to see the connection between America’s failure in Afghanistan and the growing geopolitical unrest. The WSJ believes the US is no longer respected, either by potential enemies or traditional allies.

This may well have contributed to the Russians daring to invade Ukraine, six months after the crisis in Afghanistan. The United States no longer had deterrent authority.

The only lessons the Biden regime took from Afghanistan were the wrong lessons, writes the WSJ.

“In Ukraine,” the report notes, “we decided to evacuate personnel nearly two weeks before Russia’s invasion.”

The Biden regime seems unaware that this was yet another signal to Putin that he could invade without fear of US reaction.

NTB continues to quote from the report, which claims that there is nothing to suggest that more time, money or Americans would have changed the outcome in Afghanistan.

After more than 20 years, more than 2,000 billion dollars and the training of an Afghan army of 300,000 soldiers, how quickly and easily the Taliban took control of Afghanistan suggests that there was no scenario – with the exception of a permanent and significantly expanded American military presence – which would have changed the outcome, the report says.

It highlights how quickly the Taliban defeated the Afghan forces.

In a few weeks, the Taliban defeated the Afghan soldiers that Nato and the US had trained for years to defend the country. The last American forces left in the country had to evacuate in a desperate fashion.

Once again: That the Afghan forces were miserable is self-evident. In another video, one of the instructors estimates that if drug use testing were introduced among the Afghan soldiers, up to 85 percent of the soldiers would disappear.

The vast majority of these “soldiers” had neither the will nor the ability to fight the Taliban and it is doubtful whether twenty more years of training would have changed anything in particular. Personally, I think the US should have realised this at least 15 years ago and pulled out of Afghanistan even then.

But this is not what the case is about. It is the manner in which the withdrawal was carried out that is being criticised and the rather pathetic excuses from the Biden regime afterwards.

The WSJ is merciless in its judgement. Many Americans lost confidence in Biden after the disaster in Kabul and that confidence has not been restored. The voters understand who was in charge, after more than a year and a half in the Oval Office.

Biden’s report highlights his “deliberate, intensive, rigorous and inclusive decision-making process” in Afghanistan.

This only makes it much worse, the WSJ believes.

Because it underscores that the problem was the final decision—that is, Joe Biden’s awful judgement.