Washington Post columnist David Ignatius on Thursday sounded off on President Joe Biden’s handling of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and the ensuing Taliban takeover.
Ignatius, pointing to a combative Biden who defended his decision-making, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that the White House is “really shell shocked” by the “defeat” they have been handed in Afghanistan.
“My sense, as I talk to people in the White House, watched these folks on TV, is that they are really shell shocked,” Ignatius stated. “This is a kind of defeat, a level of reversal that these folks have never known in their lives. These are people who have never gotten, you know, a bad grade in school, and suddenly they find the world collapsing around them. And I think it’s been really, really difficult for them to deal with this. It’s overwhelmed every other issue for the White House.”
“You can see it with President Biden, this defensiveness, almost brittleness,” he added. “He’s trying to talk tough, the buck stops here, you know, chaos was baked in, firm presidential lines of leadership, but even within the White House, I think there are people who wish he was being more compassionate, speaking more to the human suffering that he’s seeing around them than to the toughness and resoluteness of his own decision-making.”
Host Joe Scarborough agreed that Afghanistan has been a failure for the Biden administration, calling it a “diplomatic defeat” and a “catastrophic blow globally among our allies.”
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent
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