Joe Biden has said he takes responsibility for the bloody, often chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and said it should mark a new era in US foreign policy, relying less on military muscle,
The Guardian reports.
Addressing the nation from the White House 24 hours after the last US soldier left Kabul, Biden sought to confront his critics about the handling of the withdrawal. He celebrated the evacuation of 124,000 civilians in the 17 days following the fall of the Afghan capital and said it was time to “turn the page” on the US role abroad, pointing to a less interventionist future.
“This decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries,” the president said.
Biden said he took responsibility for what he insisted was a “wise” decision. He admitted that his administration had not anticipated the speed of the Afghan army’s collapse, but also made clear there was plenty more blame to go around, singling out his predecessor and the former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani.
He pointed out he had inherited the Doha agreement from Donald Trump’s departing administration. That accord, signed with the Taliban a year earlier, did not make the promised US withdrawal on 1 May contingent on any political settlement inside Afghanistan, and it allowed the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners. Biden said those released fighters “including some of the Taliban’s top war commanders, among those who just took control of Afghanistan”.
“By the time I came to office the Taliban was in its strongest military position since 2001, controlling or contesting nearly half of the country,” Biden said.
“So we’re left with a simple decision: either follow through on the commitment made by the last administration and leave Afghanistan, or say we weren’t leaving and commit tens of thousands more troops, going back to war.”
“I was not going to extend this forever war,” he said.
In that fundamental decision, Biden has solid support. A Pew Research Center poll published on Tuesday showed 54% of US adults agreeing that the decision to pull out was the right one. But there was limited enthusiasm for the way Biden went about it. Just over a quarter of those polled said the administration had done an excellent or good job while 42% said it had performed poorly.
Biden admitted that the assumption that the Afghan security forces would be able to hold out for some time following the US withdrawal “turned out not to be accurate”. But he suggested the biggest mistake was putting faith in Ghani, who abandoned Kabul and fled the country as the Taliban closed in.
He said that the Afghan people “watched their own government collapse and the president flee amid corruption and malfeasance, handing over the country to their enemy, the Taliban, and significantly increasing the risk to US personnel and our allies.”
