Hugh F. Culverhouse Jr., the son of the late former owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, has taken out a full-page advert in the Wall Street Journal to lambast US President Joe Biden over his handling of the Afghanistan crisis.
The New York Times reported that shortly after Biden assumed office, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley advised the president to keep troops in Afghanistan and warned of the consequences of not doing so.
In March, Austin and Milley conducted a last-ditch intervention with the president, reminding him of the failed 2011 U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq (which Biden supported), the subsequent rise of the Islamic State group in the vacuum left by U.S. troops and the costly return of the American military in 2014. “We’ve seen this movie before,” Austin reportedly cautioned Biden.
Read Also: US Air Strike Hits Suicide Bomber Near Airport, Explosion Heard Across Kabul
The Director of National Intelligence reportedly reinforced the warnings on April 9 in its annual threat assessment presented to Congress.
However, President Biden ignored the warnings and, on April 14, announced his plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
But after the Taliban chased off the Ashraf Ghani-led government and seized control of Kabul mid-August, and a suicide bomb attack killed 170 people including 13 U.S. troops, President Biden came under severe criticism.
Culverhouse Jr., the 72-year-old multimillionaire lawyer and real-estate investor, said that America has suffered “eternal shame” as a result of Biden’s “impulsive action, bias and indecision”.
Read ad below:
