Faced with withering criticism over a devastating U.S. foreign policy debacle in Afghanistan, President Joe Biden just switched into hardcore finger-pointing mode.
In a defiant speech on Monday afternoon, Biden blamed his predecessor, President Trump, for boxing him into a peace deal with the Taliban before Biden took office. And he pointedly blamed the Afghan leadership and military for, as Biden put it, refusing to fight their own war.
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In short, he said, it’s not my fault. And, despite all that, he insisted that he damn well made the right decision, anyway.
“I am deeply saddened by the facts we now face, but I do not regret my decision to end America’s war-fighting in Afghanistan,” Biden said. “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.”
Biden cast his decision to remove U.S. troops as the only reasonable choice available, after two decades of American fighting cost over $1 trillion and over 6,000 U.S. soldiers’ and contractors’ lives.
The stunning collapse of the Afghan military in recent days simply showed they were never going to be able to defend themselves, anyway, so the U.S. should go ahead and get out now, Biden insisted.
Biden acknowledged that his administration was caught flat-footed by recent events on the ground. Over the weekend, the Taliban surged back into Kabul and sent panicked civilians fleeing for their lives to the airport. The result was stunning, chaotic scenes of panicked Afghans overwhelming the Kabul airport and chasing American transport planes down the tarmac, in one last desperate attempt to leave the country.
“This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated,” Biden said.
Biden presented his decision to withdraw U.S. forces in the second half of 2021 as a measured reaction to inheriting a deal inked by Trump with the Taliban the previous year. That deal, Biden suggested, left him with no good option but to press forward with withdrawal.
“The choice I had to make as your president was either to follow through with that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season,” Biden said.
Biden reserved some of his harshest criticisms for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who has reportedly fled the country.
Biden said Afghanistan’s leadership “flatly refused” his advice to engage in diplomacy with the Taliban. He said Ghani had assured him the Afghan military would fight the Taliban—but, “he was wrong.”
“We gave them every chance to determine their own future,” Biden said. “What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.”
Biden even fired back at criticism that the U.S. has been slow to evacuate Afghan citizens and translators who helped American soldiers and diplomats over two decades of war-fighting at enormous personal risk, and who now face the threat of devastating reprisals from the Taliban.
“Some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier, still hopeful for their country,” Biden said.
