Former Pence advisor warned in 2020 that Trump was setting up another 'Benghazi' in Afghanistan
A Trump administration official who previously advised former Vice President Mike Pence warned in 2020 that former President Donald Trump might be creating another "Benghazi," a new report reveals.
Amid the chaos in Kabul, Business Insider is highlighting a November 2020 written by James Golby for The Atlantic.
"Perhaps by design, perhaps by incompetence, perhaps out of sheer spite or arrogance, Trump has created the circumstances for another Bay of Pigs, Black Hawk Down, or Benghazi," Golby wrote in his piece published by back in November.
Golby, also a U.S. Army veteran, emphasized how those were all in incidents "where the United States inserted itself into overseas conflicts enough to draw lethal opposition but without sufficient strength to protect its people."
In his published piece, he also expressed concern about Trump's mid-Novemver decision as he noted that the former president would be "leaving behind an unsustainable presence in Afghanistan, a crisis for the Afghan people, and a mess for the Biden-Harris administration."
While President Joe Biden and his administration are not to blame for the long list of backlogged Special Immigrant Visa applications pushed aside by his predecessor, refugee advocacy groups in April and May desperately appealed to the Biden.
They'd requested that the newly-elected president's administration to address the backlog of applicants months before the takeover in Kabul. However, Biden opted not to do so, but instead, he approved the deployment of a small number of U.S. troops on the ground.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani also urged Biden to hold off to avoid harming morale "and to avoid deploying more troops ahead of the complete withdrawal. According to two U.S. officials who shared details with Reuters, he was also "wary of the 'political impact' posed by a 'large number of Afghan refugees flowing into the United States.'"
On Thursday evening at the White House, President Joe Biden addressed the terrorist attack that left several U.S. Marines dead at Kabul International Airport.
"The lives we lost today were lives given in the service of liberty, the service of security and the service of others and in the service of America," said Biden. "To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone wishes America harm, know this. We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay. I will defend our interests and our people with every measure at my command. Over the past few weeks, I know many of you are probably tired of hearing me say it we've been made aware by our intelligence community that the ISIS-K, an archenemy of the Taliban, people who were freed when both those prisons were opened, has been planning a complex set of attacks on the United States personnel and others."
"We will not be deterred by terrorists," said Biden. "We will not let them stop our mission. We will continue the evacuation. I've also told my commanders to attack ISIS-K assets and we will respond with precision at our time at a place that we choose and the moment of our choosing. Here's what you need to know. These ISIS terrorists will not win. We will rescue the Americans in there. We will get our Afghan allies out and our mission will go on. America will not be intimidated."
