Less than 24 hours after the Taliban captured Afghanistan’s capital city, Kabul, US President Joe Biden addressed the nation and the world to explain and justify the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years of conflict.
“I stand squarely behind my decision” to finally withdraw U.S. combat forces, Biden said in a televised speech at the White House. “After 20 years I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces. That’s why we’re still there,” he argued.
Biden, who regretted his championing for the Iraq war as chair of the Senate committee on foreign relations in 2002, argued that the American mission in Afghanistan was accomplished.
“We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on September 11, 2001—and make sure al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again. We did that a decade ago. Our mission was never supposed to be nation-building.”
The United States and allies invaded Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, and toppled the Taliban, who had hosted al Qaeda militants responsible for the attack.
The withdrawal decision formulated during the Trump administration, to end America’s longest war, and fulfilled by the current administration emboldened Taliban fighters to sweep across the country, last week, and capture the capital, Kabul, on Sunday. The Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country followed by members of his administration and international diplomatic crews.
Thousands of Afghans trapped by the sudden Taliban takeover rushed to the airport clinging desperately to U.S. military planes to escape the new conservative system that the Taliban started to implement by forcing women to wear Hijab and covering up their images at storefronts.
At least seven people died in the chaos, including two who clung to the wheels of a C-17 and plunged to the tarmac as it flew away, and two others shot by U.S. forces. Americans said the men were armed but that there was no evidence that they were Taliban.
Biden described these images as “gut-wrenching” as he acknowledged that the Afghan collapse played out far more quickly than the most pessimistic public forecasts of his administration.
However, he blamed Afghan leaders and the military for this chaos. “The truth is: This did unfold more quickly than we anticipated. So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military gave up, sometimes without trying fighting,” Biden said.
The democrat president also doled out criticism to his Republican predecessor, Donald Trump, “whose administration negotiated a deal with the Taliban that Biden said left the group “in the strongest position militarily since 2001.”
Biden’s series of blames and arguments were his first responses to the harsh criticism of his decision from Republican and Democratic lawmakers, as well as some former generals and human rights groups.
Biden pledged to work to evacuate private U.S. citizens and citizens of foreign governments, as well as Afghans who formerly worked with Americans in the country, journalists, prominent women and other Afghans considered most at-risk of Taliban reprisal. However, he showed no regret in ending America’s longest war, a decision that plunged him into the worst crisis of his presidency. “I’d rather take the current criticism than pass the issue on to a fifth US president”. He said.
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