CLAIM: President Joe Biden argued during Thursday night’s presidential debate that his predecessor and rival Donald Trump “did nothing” to address the 20-year-old war in Afghanistan during his time in office.
Answering a question about the economy during Thursday’s CNN debate, Biden suddenly shifted the topic to the war in Afghanistan, claiming that under Trump, “people were still getting killed in Afghanistan” — presumably referring to U.S. troops.
“he [Trump] “He didn’t do anything,” Biden said, “and when he was president, we still had the perception that our country was safe. In fact, I’m the only president in this century, in this decade, who has had no soldier deaths anywhere in the world like he has.”
Trump responded by reminding Biden that they were, in fact, negotiating a withdrawal from the war.
“I was withdrawing from Afghanistan, we were withdrawing with dignity and strength and power. He was withdrawing. It was the most embarrassing day in the history of our country,” Trump said.
verdict: error
Biden’s assertion that President Trump did not act to end the war in Afghanistan and his claim that under Biden’s administration there have been “no soldier deaths anywhere in the world” are both verifiably false.
The Trump administration made ending the war in Afghanistan a top priority. Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo conducted extensive negotiations with the Taliban, sponsored by Qatar, that resulted in an agreement in which the U.S. government agreed to withdraw from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, in exchange for the Taliban not attacking Americans and severing ties with jihadist terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda.
President Biden broke the agreement and announced in April 2021 that he would extend the war from its April deadline until September 11, 2021. Confusingly, he called his decision a “withdrawal.”
The Taliban responded to the breakdown of the agreement, saying they would no longer honor their commitments, and launched a terrorist campaign consisting of more than 22,000 attacks on Afghan forces between March and July 2021. The attacks were overwhelmingly successful, forcing Afghan soldiers to flee across the border into neighboring countries and ultimately destroying Afghanistan’s regular army. On August 15, 2021, less than a month before President Biden’s deadline, Taliban leaders laid siege to the capital, Kabul, forcing then-President Ashraf Ghani into exile.
Since then, the Taliban have ruled Afghanistan unopposed.
The claim that Biden has not overseen the deaths of U.S. troops is also false. In Afghanistan, 13 U.S. soldiers were killed in a bomb attack at Kabul International Airport days after the fall of Kabul. More recently, the U.S. lost three soldiers in a jihadist attack on the Syrian-Jordanian border.
