President Joe Biden said the terrorist group responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks could “come back” now that the United States has fully withdrawn from Afghanistan.
Biden, who visited each of the three crash sites on the attacks’ 20th anniversary, said a surge in militancy from al Qaeda is possible after asserting previously that the group is “gone” from Afghanistan.
“Could al Qaeda come back? Yeah,” Biden told reporters in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, near the site where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into an empty field on Sept. 11, 2001. “But guess what? It’s already back other places. What’s the strategy? Every place where al Qaeda is, we’re going to invade and have troops stay in? Come on.”
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The comments add to Biden’s defense of the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, which has been subject to significant condemnation from Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike.
Biden said on Aug. 20 as part of that defense that al Qaeda no longer has a presence in the country, and the president also said the U.S. had completed its mission.
“Let’s put this thing in perspective here. What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point with al Qaeda gone?” Biden said. “We went to Afghanistan for the express purpose of getting rid of al Qaeda in Afghanistan as well as, as well as, getting Osama bin Laden. And we did. … We went and did the mission. You’ve known my position for a long, long time. It’s time to end this war.”
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby later contradicted Biden’s claim, saying al Qaeda continues to be there, although he said the group doesn’t pose a major threat to the U.S. homeland at the moment.
“We know that al Qaeda is a presence, as well as ISIS, in Afghanistan, and we’ve talked about that for quite some time. We do not believe it is exorbitantly high, but we don’t have an exact figure for you,” Kirby said.
Biden also insisted Saturday that the events of August, when Taliban forces swiftly overtook nearly all of Afghanistan and claimed the levers of power in the capital city of Kabul, were fated — a line of defense he employed in his very first speech on the fallout.
“It’s hard to explain to anybody how else could you get out. For example, if we were in Tajikistan and pulled up a C-130 and said, ‘We’re going to let, you know, anybody who was involved with being sympathetic to us to get on the plane,’ you’d have people hanging in the wheel well,” Biden said, recalling images of Afghans clinging to American aircraft fleeing the nation and later falling from the sky.
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Saturday marked 20 years since al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial aircraft, crashing them and killing nearly 3,000 people. While the three hijacked planes bound for each of the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, reached their targets, a passenger revolt on United Airlines Flight 93 led to the plane crashing into an empty field in Pennsylvania. The attacks triggered swift retaliation from former President George W. Bush, who oversaw the initial entrance of U.S. forces into Afghanistan, a decision that culminated in 20 years of military involvement.
Approximately 60,000 people who have been evacuated from Afghanistan since Aug. 17 have arrived in the U.S. as of last Wednesday, with a few hundred Americans believed to remain stranded in the country, according to U.S. officials.
