Donald Trump has described the Taliban’s rise in Afghanistan as the worst humiliation in American history as he once again slams his successor Joe Biden.
Former US president, Trump, also defended the agreement his administration struck with the Taliban last year and called the militants ‘good fighters’.
Speaking to Fox News on Tuesday, the 75-year-old slammed Biden’s handling of the US withdrawal but also dumped some of the blame with the Afghan forces for the Taliban’s dramatic uprising in the country.
Trump said: ‘It’s a great thing that we’re getting out, but nobody has ever handled a withdrawal worse than Joe Biden.
‘This is the greatest embarrassment, I believe, in the history of our country.
‘I knew they (Afghan security forces) weren’t going to fight… I said, “Why are they fighting? Why are these Afghan soldiers fighting against the Taliban?”, Trump recounted to host Sean Hannity.
He added: ‘The fact is, they’re among the highest-paid soldiers in the world. They were doing it for a paycheck, because once we stopped, once we left, they stopped fighting.
‘The fact is, our country was paying the Afghan soldiers a fortune. So we were sort of bribing them to fight, and that’s not what it’s all about.’
Trump then went on to repeatedly praise the Taliban as ‘good fighters’ and even said ‘you have to give them credit for that, claiming he got along better with the Islamic fundamentalists than recently deposed Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who fled the country as Taliban forces closed in.
‘I never had a lot of confidence, frankly, in Ghani’, Trump said.
‘I said that openly and plainly. I thought he was a total crook. I thought he got away with murder.
‘He spent all his time wining and dining our senators. The senators were in his pocket. That was one of the problems that we had, but I never liked him, and I guess based on his escape with cash, I don’t know, maybe that’s a true story. I would suspect it is.
‘All you have to do is look at his lifestyle, study his houses where he lives. He got away with murder in many different ways.’
In his interview with Sean Hannity, Trump also moved to defend the cease-fire agreement he reached with the Taliban, in February 2020, that came with a promise of a full withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan by May 1 2021.
That target was missed and re-set to September 11 this year, the anniversary of the 2001 terror attacks in the US.
Trump said that the agreement was forged after what he called a “strong conversation” with a Taliban leader he identified as Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a contender to become the new supreme leader of the new government.
‘I told him up front, I said look, let me just tell you right now that if anything bad happens to Americans or anybody else or if you ever come over to our land, we will hit you with a force that no country has ever been hit with before, a force so great you won’t even believe it’, he recounted.
As a result of the agreement, Trump claimed, ‘we lost no soldiers in the last year-and-a-half because of me and because of the understanding that we had’.
Summing up 20 years of American efforts in Afghanistan, Trump described the initial decision to invade in October 2001 as ‘the worst decision ever made’ and argued that the US should have limited its retaliation for the 9/11 attacks to airstrikes.
As many Afghans desperately try to feel the war-torn country, Trump said the current situation in Afghanistan was ‘many, many times worse’ than the Iran hostage crisis which tarred the presidency of another Democrat, Jimmy Carter.
Trump added: ‘I looked at that big, monster cargo plane yesterday, with people grabbing the side and trying to get flown out of Afghanistan because of their fear, their incredible fear, and they’re blowing off the plane from 2,000 feet up in the air.
‘Nobody’s ever seen anything like that. This has been the most humiliating period of time I’ve ever seen.’ Metro