How Congress is reacting to Biden’s decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan

President Biden is expected to formally announce his decision today to withdraw the remaining 2,500 US troops in Afghanistan before Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that led the US into its longest war.

“I am now the fourth American president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan. Two Republicans. Two Democrats,” he will say. “I will not pass this responsibility to a fifth.”

In a sign he views his remarks as a historic bookend to the prolonged conflict, he will deliver them from precisely the same spot in the White House Treaty Room that President George W. Bush announced the start of the war on Oct. 7, 2001.

Afterward, he’ll visit the section of Arlington National Cemetery where many of America’s war dead from Afghanistan are buried.

Biden will say in his speech that American diplomatic and humanitarian efforts will continue in Afghanistan and would support peace efforts between the Afghan government and the Taliban. But he’ll be unequivocal that two decades after it began, the Afghanistan war is ending.

“It is time to end America’s longest war. It is time for American troops to come home,” he’ll say.

The deadline Biden has set is absolute, with no potential for extension based on worsening conditions on the ground. Officials said after two decades of war, it was clear to the President that throwing more time and money at Afghanistan’s problems wasn’t going to work. Some US troops will remain to protect Americans diplomats, though officials declined to provide a precise number.

Biden has spent months weighing his decision, and determined a war in Afghanistan that killed some 2,300 troops and cost more than $2 trillion no longer fit within the pressing foreign policy concerns of 2021.

Read more about Biden’s remarks here.