Defiant Biden Doubles Down on Afghan Withdrawal: ‘I Stand Squarely Behind My Decision’

President Biden addressed the crisis in Afghanistan on Monday afternoon, striking a defiant tone while insisting he still stands “squarely behind” his decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from the country despite the Taliban’s insurgency and the government’s swift collapse.

“After 20 years I learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces,” he said in remarks from the White House.

While saddened, Biden said that he does not regret the decision to pull out of Afghanistan and insisted that the bloodshed could have been brought to an end years before.

“We never gave up the hunt for Osama bin Laden and we got him. That was a decade ago,” Biden said. “Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building.”

The remarks come after Biden returned from a retreat at Camp David days ahead of schedule amid growing criticism over his administration’s handling of the withdrawal after roughly two decades of war, spanning four presidencies. Provincial capitals had rapidly fallen in recent weeks as U.S. forces departed. The nation’s government collapsed entirely over the weekend with the Taliban’s seizure of the Afghan capital.

Early Monday, video footage captured a chaotic scene at Kabul’s international airport showing panicked Afghans desperately trying to grab onto the exterior of an outbound American military jet hours after the nation’s president, Ashraf Ghani, fled the country. At least seven people were reported dead amid the turmoil at the airport.

Rejecting criticism from both sides of the aisle, Biden blamed the Taliban’s swift takeover on the Afghan military’s refusal to fight and on Afghan political leaders who “gave up and fled the country,” while insisting he would remain laser-focused on counterterrorism efforts.

“The events we are seeing now are sadly proof that no amount of military force would ever deliver a stable, united, secure Afghanistan, that’s known in history as the graveyard of empires,” Biden said Tuesday. “I will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little more time in Afghanistan will make all the difference.”

Kabul’s Evacuation Crisis Has People Falling from the Sky

He compared the decision he faced with a choice not to repeat the mistakes of the past when political leaders stayed on in Vietnam, while arguing that his decision was focused on the welfare of American troops.

“American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves,” he said.

The chaos of recent days comes after Biden announced in April plans to ensure final American withdrawal from Afghanistan by Sept. 11.

Last month, Biden had brushed away concerns about a Taliban takeover, insisting that “300,000 well-equipped” Afghan troops surely outweighed roughly 75,000 Taliban and the Taliban were “not even close” in terms of their capacity when compared with Afghan National Security Forces and the training of the federal police.

“The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely,” he said on July 8.

It now appears that those assessments had not fully grasped realities on the ground.

In a statement on Saturday, Biden suggested that former President Donald Trump shouldered some of the blame after cutting a deal with the Taliban in 2019 that imposed a May 1, 2021, deadline on U.S. Forces’ departure.

Trump had also cut down U.S. forces in the country to a bare minimum of 2,500, which Biden said left him to either follow through on the deal or to send more American troops—a move that he reiterated on Monday that he was unwilling to make.

“I cannot and will not ask our troops to fight on endlessly in another country’s civil war, taking casualties, suffering life shattering injuries, leaving families broken by grief and loss,” Biden said. “This is not in our national security interest. It is not what the American people want. It is not what our troops who have sacrificed so much over the past two decades deserve.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here

Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!

Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.