By TN Ashok
Washington, Apr 9 (IANS): Nikki Haley, former Republican UN Ambassador of US who has announced her 2024 presidential run, has denounced President Joe Biden's hasty withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan and shifting the blame to his predecessor Donald Trump for the resultant chaos.
Biden never took his allies, who fought shoulder to shoulder in the hilly terrain for over three decades against terrorism, into confidence about the withdrawal and made America open to criticism for the Taliban overrunning the elected government, media reports said.
Nikki Halley, an Indian American whose parents migrated from Amritsar to the US, was born and brought up in South Carolina, the state of which she became the governor, and later, Trump appointed her as US ambassador to the UN.
She said they were making fun of us. "It's a terrible image throughout the world that we have had. We were completely defeated."
The White House last week released a 12-page unclassified report of what it called the after action summary on the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, first initiated by then President Donald Trump and followed upon by his successor Joe Biden.
Biden's administration blamed former President Trump's White House for much of what took place.
The overrunning of the democratically elected government by the Taliban and the fleeing of the President from the country since troop's withdrawal has drawn fire from all quarters in the world, reports said.
The 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," The Washington Examiner quoted him as saying.
Critics have since slammed the Biden administration for projecting the wrong narrative blaming the Republicans 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 US ambassador to the UN 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, and 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 said.
"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," the examiner quoted her as saying.
The US left military equipment in Afghanistan while withdrawing from the country only to be used by the Taliban in their overrun over the capital city of Kabul.
She charged saying: "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."
Haley said her criticism was not directed towards "why our troops got out" but the "manner in which they got out" leaving everything behind for the Taliban to use.
She said Biden withdrew the troops in the most embarrassing of circumstances and lost 13 brothers and sisters in the process. That was not the way it was supposed to play out, she said.
Haley termed as a debacle the manner in which the Biden administration withdrew the troops. Much of the current issues, she said, have been influenced by what the world observed from the US in 2021, such as "the Russian invasion in Ukraine", "China sending over a spy balloon", and "Iran trying to build a bomb", among others.