WASHINGTON: US President Joe Biden has now irked Afghans by repeatedly disparaging their country as a “Godforsaken place,” causing Kabul’s Taliban rulers to claim that the American leader was doing so out of frustration.

Last month, President Biden annoyed Pakistanis when he described their country as “one of the most dangerous nations in the world” that possessed nuclear weapons without any ‘cohesion’.

On Friday, he targeted Afghanistan. “A lot of you have been to Afghanistan. I’ve been to every part of it. It’s a Godforsaken place — it’s a Godforsaken place,” said the US president while addressing war veterans at an election rally in San Diego.

He recounted his several trips to the Afghan war zone as a senator and vice president of the United States, including the one in 2008 when he got stranded in the snow.

Zabiullah Mujahid describes remarks as result of his frustration over losing midterm elections

On Saturday, Chief Tali­b­an spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid responded to Mr Biden’s remarks at a news conference in Kabul, claiming that the US leader was doing so in frustration because his party was losing the midterm elections in the US.

“Those making such remarks are doing so out of their frustration and envy for Afghanistan,” he said, adding that since the Taliban takeover in August 2022, peace and stability had returned to Afgh­anistan and the Afghans were “going about with their daily lives normally.”

President Biden withdrew US troops from Afgha­nistan in August 2021, after two decades of war with the Taliban, and the withdrawal led to an immediate collapse of the US-backed government in Kabul.

The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates the longest military intervention in US history cost Washington about $2 trillion and took the lives of more than 2,400 American soldiers since 2001.

The United States and its Western partners suspended financial assistance to Kabul after the collapse while the Biden administration also imposed banking sector sanctions and froze billions of dollars in Afghan central bank’s foreign reserves.

Published in Dawn, November 6th, 2022