Presidential candidate Nikki Haley slammed the Biden administration‘s orchestration of the U.S. military’s exit from Afghanistan in a recent interview, recalling that “They were making fun of us. I mean, it set a terrible image throughout the world that we had, we were completely defeated.”
Last week, the White House released a 12-page unclassified summary of the after-action report on the Afghanistan withdrawal, and notably, President Joe Biden’s administration blamed former President Trump’s White House for much of what took place.
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Afterward, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby claimed the exit from Afghanistan, during which 13 service members were killed in a bombing at the Kabul Airport, was not chaotic. “For all this talk of chaos, I didn’t see it from my perch,” he said. “I just don’t buy the whole argument of chaos.”
Critics have since criticized the administration for crafting a “fabulist narrative” and being disingenuous in claiming there was no chaos.
“I mean, the idea that we left Afghanistan in the middle of the night, without telling our allies, who stood shoulder to shoulder with us for decades, because we asked them to be there,” Haley told Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM Patriot. “I mean, think about what that told our allies. More importantly, think about what that told our enemies.”
The former ambassador to the United Nations and former South Carolina governor claimed that “[Afghanistan] had made strides, especially with women, on the fact that women could be educated, women had jobs, women were making so much progress.”
“And now you look back, and they have, you know, we’ve seen the fact that all of that has gone backwards,” she explained. “And you know, there is no religious freedom there at all. There’s only, you know, control and aggressiveness, and they’ve taken it back.”
She further noted how the U.S. left military equipment in the midst of the seemingly rushed withdrawal.
“We left all of our military equipment, and I remember my husband looking at a video, and he was looking at a video of the Taliban and he’s saying, ‘They’re driving our Jeeps,’” she recalled. “And then he goes, ‘They’re holding our guns.’ And then the worst part was, he was like, ‘They’re wearing our uniforms.’”
According to Haley, it doesn’t have to do with supporting the exit from Afghanistan or not. “Many of [servicemembers] thought we should, but it’s how we got out.”
“Not only did we just get out in the most embarrassing of circumstances, but then they lost 13 brothers and sisters in the process,” she said. “That was never the way it was supposed to be.”
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Haley claimed that many of the current international issues are informed by what happened during that exit. “It all goes back to the debacle we had in Afghanistan,” she explained.
She gave examples of current issues that have been influenced by what the world observed from the U.S. in 2021, such as “the Russian invasion in Ukraine,” “China sending over a spy balloon,” and “Iran trying to build a bomb,” among others.
