US President Joe Biden came back to the White House from the presidential retreat at Camp David to address the US withdrawal from Afghanistan that has resulted in total collapse of the government in Kabul and a Taliban takeover.
Biden opened up with a fiery defense of the US’ invasion of Afghanistan, celebrating the destruction of Al-Qaeda and the killing of Osama Bin Laden, though the latter took place in Pakistan almost ten years after the invasion.
However, the president then condemned the “nation building” that the US had engaged in for much of the two-decade war, and defended his decision to pull out now.
Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to be nation-building… creating a unified, centralized democracy,” but “preventing a terrorist attack on [the] American homeland
Biden blamed his predecessor Donald Trump for making a deal with the Taliban to withdraw the US troops from Afghanistan by May 1 – which his administration only partially repudiated, to extend the deadline through August 31. He also blamed the US-backed Afghan government for failing to fight against the Taliban, even after Washington spent tens of billions of dollars creating an army bigger than that of some NATO allies.
“We gave them every tool they could need,” Biden said. “We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them, was the will to fight for that future.”
Without that, no amount of length of US presence wouldn’t have made any difference, he argued. “It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own forces would not.”
While he did not take questions from the reporters present, in his 20-minute address Biden mainly defended himself from the hypothetical that withdrawing from Afghanistan was wrong to begin with – something very few Americans have actually argued.
“What’s happening now is sadly proof that no amount of military force would ever deliver a stable, united, secure Afghanistan,” he said.
Biden also painted himself as a brave leader taking an unpopular stand. “I cannot and will not ask our troops to fight on endlessly in another country’s civil war,” he said at one point, adding that he promised to end America’s longest foreign war during the 2020 campaign.
“It’s been hard and messy, and yes far from perfect, I’ve honored that commitment,” he said.
I am president of the United States, and the buck stops with me.
Biden departed for Camp David on Thursday and was scheduled to stay there until Wednesday. White House press secretary Jen Psaki took the week off, according to out-of-office responses to email inquiries by media outlets over the weekend. With almost all of Afghanistan under Taliban control now, and the evacuation from Kabul airport interrupted by crowds of Afghans desperate to climb on board the departing planes, the administration’s plans appear to have changed.
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