Former U.S. President Donald Trump took advantage of the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on Saturday to criticize in a video the “inept administration” of Joe Biden for his “incompetence” in withdrawing from Afghanistan .
“This is a very sad day,” the former president said, adding that 9/11 “represents great harm to (his) country.”
“It is also a sad time for the way our war against those who did so much harm to our country ended last week,” he continued.
Trump was referring to the end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, launched in the wake of al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, and the Pentagon in Washington DC.
Al-Qaeda had taken refuge in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and the US invasion toppled the Islamist regime in an attempt to find the group’s leaders.
But the Taliban soon launched an insurgency, and after two decades of clashes in which Afghan civilians paid a hefty price, they returned to power last month when the United States withdrew all its troops.
“The leader of our country was made to look like a fool and that can never be allowed,” he said.
He blamed “poor planning, incredible weakness and leaders who didn’t really understand what was happening.”
Trump has also mourned the deaths of 13 U.S. soldiers in a bomb blast in Kabul last month during the frantic evacuation of Afghanistan, and the billions of dollars in U.S. military equipment that remained back and confiscated by the Taliban “without a single shot being fired.”
“Joe Biden and his inept administration were defeated,” Trump continued. “We will fight to recover from the shame that this incompetence has caused.”