WASHINGTON – President
Joe Biden on Monday said he stands by his decision to pull American troops
out of Afghanistan and said the Taliban's swift seizure of Kabul unfolded
"more quickly than we anticipated."
Biden had not
yet spoken publicly about the Taliban's takeover of the country, a
foreign policy debacle – particularly for a president who came to the
office with decades of foreign policy experience.
Taliban fighters
completed their stunning sweep by seizing control of Afghanistan’s capital
Sunday as American troops scrambled to evacuate thousands of U.S.
diplomats and Afghans from the U.S. Embassy.
Biden said there
have been "gut-wrenching" scenes in Afghanistan as the U.S. struggles
to pull out its people. Biden defended his overall plan to withdraw
from the country, as well as efforts to close the embassy and secure the
airport in order to fly people to safety.
Biden said there
have "gut-wrenching" scenes in Afghanistan as the U.S. struggles to
pull out its people. He spent more time defending his overall plan to withdraw
from the country, as well as efforts to close the embassy and secure the
airport in order to fly people to safety.
Biden said Afghan
leaders had assured him that their army would stand up and fight the Taliban,
but they did not. He also said he followed through on a withdrawal plan
developed during the administration of former President Donald Trump.
Biden
added there "was never a good time to withdraw US forces."
Afghan security
forces dissolved as the Taliban raced to Kabul in a matter to days. Protesters
blocked access to the airport as the U.S. scrambled to get its people out of
the country.
The president said
the Taliban takeover was faster than expected, but Afghan officials - including
former President Ashraf Ghani – had assured him that Afghan forces would fight
the insurgents.
“The truth is, this
did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated,” Biden said.
At one point,
dozens of supporters jogged beside and in front of a military transport plane,
trying to prevent it from taking off. Some clung to the plane itself and fell
to their deaths as it ascended.
Speaking just
before Biden's speech, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called
the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban "an embarrassment for our country
and a victory for terrorists around the world."
McConnell said the
U.S. has "abandoned the women and children of Afghanistan to these
barbarians," and left behind thousands of Afghan allies. "We turned
our backs on our friends and left the country in chaos," said the Senate's
top Republican.
Biden tried to
justify the troop withdrawal, saying at one point "I know my
decision will be criticized."
Under pressure to
address the chaotic pullout, Biden returned Monday from a working vacation at
Camp David to deliver his remarks.
He took no
questions from reporters and quickly went back to the presidential retreat.
As Biden remained at Camp David on
Monday morning, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan made the rounds of the
news shows to defend the administration.
“The president had
to make the best possible choice he could and he stands by that decision,”
Sullivan said on NBC’s “Today" show.
But the Biden
comments that much of the media continue to highlight are the president’s previous optimistic
statements that it was “highly unlikely” that the Taliban would
overrun the entire country after the U.S. withdrew from its 20-year
involvement.
Republicans called for Biden to – as
Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse put it – “come out of hiding, and take charge of the
mess he created.”
“President Biden
needs to man up,” Sasse tweeted.
House Minority
Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., was equally blunt.
“Mr. President,” McCarthy tweeted,
along with video of Afghani's climbing aboard a taxiing U.S. Air Force
jet, “Do your job and address the nation.”
Biden, who left
Washington on Thursday, had been scheduled to be in Camp David in
Maryland through Wednesday. He had been out of sight save for an
image of him participating in a videoconference that was released Sunday by the
White House.
Robert Gibbs, who
served as White House press secretary during the Obama administration, called
it imperative that Biden speak to the nation and the world.
“Hopefully this
happens very soon,” Gibbs tweeted Monday morning. “He must lay out again the
reasoning behind his decisions, how he sees the future of this region &
what must be done to prevent another safe haven for al-Qaeda to plan attacks.”
Gil Barndollar, a
Middle East expert at the Center for the Study of Statesmanship, said he hopes
Biden owns his decision – despite how quickly the situation deteriorated
– and doesn’t try to blame the Trump administration.
Barndollar said a
lot of what happened in recent days was already baked into the equation after
“twenty years of hubris and self-deception” about how things were going in
Afghanistan.
“Trying to execute
a flawless end game after that, to me, is like cramming for a final the night
before after failing a course all semester,” he said.
At the same time,
he added, Biden needs to give an explanation for the “massive failure” of
contingency planning.
“Clearly nobody in
the U.S. government really considered the absolute worse case possibility the
Afghanistan government would collapse literally overnight,” he said.
Seth Jones, senior
vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said
Biden needs to focus less on what’s happened and shouldn’t try to deflect
blame. Instead, he must address the burgeoning humanitarian crisis both of
refugees fleeing the Taliban and those who will suffer under their repressive
regime.
Secondly, Biden
must explain how the U.S. will handle what is likely to be a resurgence of
terrorist groups in Afghanistan.
“He needs to start
outlining future plans rather than trying to focus on the past and spinning
what's just happened,” Jones said.
Biden's return to
the East Room Monday afternoon to discuss Afghanistan comes about five weeks
after he got defensive when reporters pressed him on whether it was
inevitable that the Afghan government would collapse.
Biden said the
Afghan troops were "as well-equipped as any army in the world."
"The
likelihood there's going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning
the whole country is highly unlikely," he said.
On ABC’s “Good
Morning America,” Sullivan defended Biden’s assertion.
“He thought the
Afghan national security forces could step up and fight,” Sullivan said.
On NBC's
"Today," Sullivan acknowledged how much that assessment was
off.
“The speed with
which cities fell," he said, "was much greater than anyone
anticipated."
On CBS’s “This Morning,” Sullivan said
Biden “was not prepared to usher in a third decade of war and put U.S. troops
in harm’s way, fighting and dying to try to hold Afghanistan together when its
own armed forces would not fight to hold it together.”
“This is about
hard choices,” Sullivan said, “and the choice he made he believes was in the
national security interest of the United States.”
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