Tag: Biden

  • ‘Cannot defend a nation whose leaders gave up and fled’: US President

    ‘Cannot defend a nation whose leaders gave up and fled’: US President

    United States (US) President Joe Biden blamed the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan on Afghan political leaders who fled the country and the unwillingness of the US-trained Afghan army to fight the militant group.

    In his speech, Biden said that the US troops could not defend a nation whose leaders “gave up and fled”, as did Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.

    “I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I have learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw US forces,” Biden said in a televised address from the White House.

    While Biden said he took responsibility for the fate of the US mission, he lashed out at the former Afghan government and military commanders who were put in place, organised, and supported by Washington over the last 20 years.

    Instead of standing up to the advancing Taliban — a highly experienced guerrilla force but more lightly armed than the US-supplied Afghan army — the government fled.

    “We gave them every chance to determine their own future. We could not provide them with the will to fight for that future,” Biden said, adding he could no longer ask US soldiers to risk their lives in the country, 20 years on.

    “Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralised democracy.”

    “American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves,” said the US president.

    “We gave them every chance to determine their own future. We could not provide them was the will to fight for their future,” added Biden.

    “If Afganistan is unable to mount any real resistance at the Taliban now, there is no chance that one more year, five more years or 20 more years the US military boots on the ground would have made any difference,” said Biden.

    Biden said that the political leaders were unable to stand for their own people. He said that the leaders were unable to negotiate for the future of their people when the chips were down.

    Biden acknowledged that the Taliban’s speed in retaking the country was unexpected.

    “The truth is: This did unfold more quickly than we anticipated. So what’s happened? Afghanistan’s political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military gave up, sometimes without trying to fight,” Biden said.

    “Our true strategic competitors, China and Russia, would love nothing more than the United States to continue to funnel billions of dollars in resources and attention into stabilizing Afghanistan indefinitely,” he said.

    Biden said he was “left again to ask of those who argue that we should stay: how many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghans — Afghanistan’s civil war — when Afghan troops will not?”

    “I will not repeat the mistakes we made in the past,” said Biden.

    President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan fled the country as the Taliban entered Kabul, amidst severe criticism from his opponents, saying that now is not the time for him to leave his country as the dreaded Taliban come back to rule once more.

    The Taliban declared that the war in Afghanistan was over after its fighters swept into the capital, Kabul, and President Ashraf Ghani fled the country on Sunday.

  • Fatima Bhutto expresses anger over Biden administration

    Fatima Bhutto has expressed her anger over Joe Biden’s administration for approving the potential sale of $735 million in precision-guided weapons to Israel.

    Sharing the news report of the approval on Twitter, Fatima Bhutto wrote: “The Biden administration has blood on its hands already and they are intent on getting them dirtier and dirtier.”

    As per congressional sources US lawmakers were not expected to object to the deal despite violence between Israel and Palestinian militants Reuters has reported.

    Other people are also expressing their anger over the deal :

    https://twitter.com/sunshine_leb/status/1394290306086998026

    Israeli bombardment of Gaza, a Palestinian terrority, is the worst the world has seen in years. Israeli fighter jets continue to pound central Gaza with bombs, as the death toll of the Palestinians killed in the fighting has reached to 212, 61 among them are children.

  • US Electoral College will vote today to confirm Biden’s presidential win

    United States Electors will gather in state capitols across the country today to formally vote for Joe Biden as the next US president, effectively ending President Donald Trump’s frenzied but failing attempt to overturn his loss in the November 3 election.

    The state-by-state votes, traditionally an afterthought, have taken on outsized significance this year in light of Trump’s unprecedented assault on the nation’s democratic process. Pushing false claims of widespread fraud, Trump has pressured state officials to throw the election results out and declare him the winner.

    In the United States, a candidate becomes president not by winning a majority of the national popular vote but through an Electoral College system, which allots electoral votes to the 50 states and the District of Columbia largely based on their population. 

    Election results show Biden, the Democratic former vice president, won 306 of the 538 electoral votes available – exceeding the necessary 270. Trump, a Republican, earned 232.

    In capitols such as Lansing, Michigan; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; and Atlanta, Georgia, electors – typically party loyalists – will gather to formally cast those votes.

    While there are sometimes a handful of “rogue” electors who vote for someone other than the winner of their state’s popular vote, the vast majority rubber-stamp their state’s results, and officials do not expect anything different on Monday.

    Trump has called on Republican state legislators to appoint their own electors, essentially ignoring the will of the voters. State lawmakers have largely dismissed the idea.

    The votes cast on Monday will be sent to Congress to be officially counted on January 6, the final stage of America’s complex election process.

    Trump said late last month he will leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for Biden, but has since pressed on with his unprecedented campaign to overturn his defeat, filing without success numerous lawsuits challenging state vote counts. On Friday, the US Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit filed by Texas that sought to invalidate the results in four states that Biden won.

    Once the Electoral College vote is complete, Trump’s sole remaining gambit would be to convince Congress not to certify the count on Jan. 6. Federal law allows individual lawmakers to challenge states’ electoral votes, which prompts both the House of Representatives and the Senate to debate the objections before voting on whether to sustain them.

    Mo Brooks, a conservative Republican congressman, has vowed to file challenges when Congress reviews the vote next month, though it is all but certain both chambers would reject his effort. Democrats control the House, while several moderate Republicans in the Senate have already publicly accepted Biden’s victory.

    In 2016, Trump won the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes. The formal vote earned extra attention when some Democratic activists called for electors to “go rogue” against Trump. In the end, seven electors broke ranks, an unusually high number but still far too few to sway the outcome.

    ‘Landmines’

    “There are a lot of landmines in the Electoral College, and this election really revealed a lot of them,” he said.

    Even if Monday’s vote runs smoothly, Trump’s efforts – such as encouraging state legislatures to appoint their own sets of “dueling” electors – have exposed the potential flaws in the system, said Robert Alexander, a professor at Ohio Northern University who has written a book about the Electoral College.

    While the electoral votes normally involve some pomp and circumstance, most events this year will be significantly scaled back due to the coronavirus pandemic.

    In Michigan, for instance, the 16 electors are allowed to bring only a single guest; Arizona has shifted its ceremony from the capitol building to an unassuming government facility and pared down the list of invitees. At least one state, Nevada, intends to hold its electoral vote entirely virtually.

    The process of choosing electors varies by state. In some, state parties pick electors at local or state conventions, while in others, the party leadership chooses the slate. In Pennsylvania, the presidential candidates themselves pick their electors, while in California, Democratic congressional nominees select them.