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Former President Donald Trump asked on Sunday the current President, Joe Biden, not to delay until September the withdrawal of this country’s troops in Afghanistan that he had ordered for May.
“We can and should get out earlier. Nineteen years is enough, in fact, far too much and way too long,” Trump said in a statement from his office, based in Palm Beach (Florida), where he has resided since last January.
Trump explained he had already done the most relevant thing by withdrawing early “billions of dollars in equipment”, and, above all, reducing the US military presence in that country “to less than 2,000 soldiers” from the 16,000 that had previously been deployed in the Asian country.
On the 14th, Biden announced that the complete withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan would be completed by next September, the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
A previous agreement between the Afghan Taliban and the Trump Administration had set the withdrawal for May 1, but Biden has decided to delay it by a few months.
Donald Trump, who served from 2017 to 2021, said “hopefully” Biden won’t use that date for the troop withdrawal, alluding to 9/11.
“September 11th represents a very sad event and period for our country and should remain a day of reflection and remembrance in honor of those great souls we lost,” the Republican considered in his statement.
It was precisely the attacks of September 11, 2001 against the twin towers in New York and against the Pentagon, in which nearly 3,000 people died, that led to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, from where Osama Bin Laden, the leader of the Al Qaeda terrorist group that perpetrated the terrorist attack, was operating.
And although for Trump the departure of U.S. troops after two decades is “a wonderful and positive thing,” that withdrawal should, in his opinion, be “as close as possible” to the May 1 that he had previously established.
This would reduce even further and as soon as possible the U.S. military presence abroad after the departure of soldiers from Iraq and Syria, where, the former president said, there are no troops left “except in the area where we control the oil”.
The Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, defended this Sunday in an interview to ABC News the exit of the United States from Afghanistan once the objective of dismantling Al Qaeda has been achieved, which, in his opinion, no longer has the capacity to carry out attacks from Afghanistan against the country.
