President Joe Biden stood “squarely” behind his achievements in Afghanistan during the nearly eight months he has been president.
During a 10-minute prepared statement he read at the White House on Monday, he said, “I am president of the United States of America and the buck stops with me.”
Biden, who ran on his strong foreign policy background, only read a teleprompter for 10 minutes and then walked away without taking questions from the media. He returned to Camp David, where he was originally planning to stay until Wednesday. Vice President Kamala Harris was nowhere in sight.
“I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw US forces. That’s why we’re still there. We were clear-eyed about the risk. We planned for every constituency, er, contingency… The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we anticipated,” Biden said.
The original mission was to stop terrorists after 9-11, he said.
“Our only interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been, preventing a terrorist attack on America’s homeland. I have argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counterterrorism, not counterinsurgency or nationbuilding. That’s why I opposed the surge when it was proposed in 2009 when I was vice president,” Biden said.
“That’s why as president, I am adamant that we focus on the threats we face today in 2021, not yesterday’s threats. Today, the terrorist threat has metastasized well beyond Afghanistan,” he said.
He said the mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building. “It was never supposed to be creating a unified centralized democracy.”
Biden said he had no alternative but to follow an agreement set forth by former President Donald Trump, which was originally to have troops out of Afghanistan by May 1.
“The choice I had to make as your president, was either to follow through on that agreement, or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season,” Biden said.
He did not addressed the botched pull-out of Kabul that has left hundreds of civilians dead in its wake, many being pulled from their homes and executed by Taliban fighters.
As he gave his remarks, Americans were also watching on social media various video footage of chaos and desperation at the Kabul airport, where people have been seen clinging to a U.S. military transporter and falling to their deaths once the aircraft became airborne. Also at the airport, U.S. troops shot and killed two reportedly armed men. Bodies littered the area, some possibly trampled.
In July, Biden predicted a different outcome, including a country ruled split into two and ruled separately.
“There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan,” he said. “The likelihood there’s going to be one unified government in Afghanistan controlling the whole country is highly unlikely.”
