Angelina Jolie is “ashamed” of how President Joe Biden has handled the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
SUBSCRIBE to our NEW Christian podcast for news and Christian views!
In her first Instagram post, the A-list celebrity and humanitarian rebuked the Biden administration for its increasingly chaotic exit from the Middle Eastern country, which has since been besieged by the Taliban.
“It is sickening to watch Afghans being displaced yet again out of the fear and uncertainly that has gripped their country,” wrote Jolie, the daughter of conservative actor Jon Voight. “To spend so much time and money, to have blood shed and lives lost only to come to this, is a failure almost impossible to understand.”
From 2001 through April of this year, the war in Afghanistan has cost American taxpayers some $2.3 trillion and more than 170,000 lives.
Jolie also wrote a column for Time magazine, “The People of Afghanistan Deserve So Much Better Than This,” in which she condemned the way the U.S. pulled out of the war-torn country.
***As the number of voices facing big-tech censorship continues to grow, please sign up for Faithwire’s daily newsletter and download the CBN News app, developed by our parent company, to stay up-to-date with the latest news from a distinctly Christian perspective.***
“Whatever your views on the war in Afghanistan, we probably agree on one thing: it should not have ended this way,” she wrote. “Giving up the idea of a peace agreement between the Afghan government and the Taliban, appearing to cut and run, and abandoning our allies and supporters in the most chaotic way imaginable, after so many years of effort and sacrifice, is a betrayal and a failure impossible to fully understand.”
She went on to rebuke the White House for seeming “to have lacked the will to plan this transition in a managed way,” arguing the exit “could have been better, more decent, and safer.”
Jolie continued:
As an American, I am ashamed by the manner of our leaving. It diminishes us. We have lost leverage to influence what now happens in Afghanistan. We lack a strategy to monitor and support women and civil society in Afghanistan, who the Taliban have a history of targeting—banning girls from school, confining women to the home, and inflicting brutal physical punishments, including public lashing, on any woman perceived to have stepped out of line.
Our allies are rightly upset, blaming the U.S. for a precipitate, unilateral withdrawal that missed the opportunity for any coordinated plan to preserve some of the gains made in the country. We have to acknowledge and address these realities, if we are to have any hope of learning from this dark moment.
The “Eternals” star warned the U.S. exit from Afghanistan will trigger a “new refugee crisis,” adding she’s thinking “of every Afghan girl who picked up her book bag and went to school in the last 20 years even though she risked being killed for it.”
Oddly, despite facing intense criticism from international leaders, Biden said last week he has “seen no question of our credibility from our allies around the world” and claimed he has instead seen praise for his calamitous exit from Afghanistan.
Fox News’ Chris Wallace asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken if the president is, for some reason, not aware of what’s happening.
“Mr. Secretary, does the president not know what’s going on?” Wallace asked, noting Biden is “flat wrong” in his suggestion that everyone is pleased with his withdrawal from the country.
Blinken, for his part, excused the president by saying this is an “incredibly emotional time for many of us.”
“The president said he’s not heard any criticism from the allies,” Wallace pressed again. “There’s been a lot of criticism from the allies. Words matter, and the words of the president matter most.”
***As the number of voices facing big-tech censorship continues to grow, please sign up for Faithwire’s daily newsletter and download the CBN News app, developed by our parent company, to stay up-to-date with the latest news from a distinctly Christian perspective.***