President Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal is likely to go down as one of the biggest strategic blunders in American history. No matter how hard he tries to point the blame to the previous administration the repercussions of his poor decisions are his to bear alone. Now, even members of his administration and his top generals are confirming the fact President Biden ignored their advice and forged ahead with his Afghanistan pullout plans, leading to the current catastrophe in the Middle East.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Some former officials, however, say Mr. Biden’s troop withdrawal was a blunder and that the fallout could have lasting repercussions. The cratering security, which has put the Biden administration in a race to evacuate thousands of Afghan allies, may threaten the rights of women and could provide terrorist groups with an opportunity to move into Afghanistan’s ungoverned spaces.

“I think it is damning for him to have created this situation in his first significant action as commander in chief,” said Ryan Crocker, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan during the Obama administration and has worked under Democratic as well as Republican presidents. “It’s an unforced error, and as an American I am deeply concerned.”

In contrast to the numerous Trump policies he reversed, he opted to carry out Mr. Trump’s deal with the Taliban instead of trying to renegotiate it. In so doing, he overruled his top military commanders: Gen. Frank McKenzie, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East; Gen. Austin Scott Miller, who led NATO forces in Afghanistan; and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Citing the risks of removing American forces to Afghan security and the U.S. Embassy, they recommended that the U.S. keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan while stepping up diplomacy to try to cement a peace agreement.

“This is really his first big decision as commander in chief,” said Eliot Cohen, a military historian and a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced and International Studies. “He is unquestionably willing to stare down his advisers. This is a decision that involves a lot of blood, just not American blood. Whether it was wise or not, it was not an act of weakness. He is a hard guy, determined to follow through on his instincts, and live with the consequences.”

President Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has also acknowledged that Biden was surprised by how quickly the Taliban was able to move through and conquer the country of Afghanistan.

Fox News reports:

“The president did not think it was inevitable that the Taliban were going to take control of Afghanistan,” Sullivan said. “He thought the Afghan national security forces could step up and fight because we spent 20 years, tens of billions of dollars, training them, giving them the best equipment, giving them support of U.S. forces for 20 years.”

“When push came to shove, they decided not to step up and fight for their country,” Sullivan said, adding that the president was faced with the question of whether U.S. men and women should be “put in the middle of another country’s civil war when their own army won’t fight to defend them?”

“We planned for a wide range of contingencies, one of those was the need to flow in a substantial number of forces to secure the airport and be able to facilitate that evacuation,” Sullivan explained. “We have now successfully drawn down the U.S. embassy in Kabul. We have moved all of those personnel either to the airport or out of the country. And we flowed in several thousand troops who had been prepositioned in theater for precisely this purpose.”

Sullivan said the president “activated that deployment well before the fall of Kabul, because as we watch this situation unfold, and it certainly unfolded at unexpected speed, we put that contingency plan in place.”

The Taliban quickly took over the country and invaded the capital, Kabul over the weekend. The Afghanistan president fled the country and now thousands of Afghani citizens are desperately trying to flee the country. The efforts have led to total chaos in airports as people try to leave the country.