President Joe Biden defended the way his administration handled the Afghanistan pullout while heartily criticizing former President Donald Trump for helping the Taliban regain their “strongest military position since 2001.”
Biden’s remarks Tuesday afternoon on the end of the United States’s 20-year war in Afghanistan were his first public comments following the conclusion of the U.S. troop withdrawal on Monday afternoon. He took credit for what he described as the successful evacuation of “90%” of Americans who wanted to get out.
‘MILITARY MISSION’ AND EVACUATIONS OVER IN AFGHANISTAN
The president first noted that despite pulling all military assets from the country, the U.S. had secured commitments from the Taliban not to interfere with the remaining humanitarian evacuations carried out by America and its partners.
Without calling Trump out by name, he faulted his “predecessor” for setting a May 1 withdrawal deadline without securing commitments the Taliban “work out a cooperative governance arrangement with the Afghan government.”
“It did authorize the release of 5,000 prisoners last year, including some of the Taliban’s top war commanders,” Biden continued. “Among those, 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.”
The president suggested that, on his first day in office, Trump’s deal left him two choices.
“Follow the agreement of the previous administration and extend it, or extend to have more time for people to get out, or send in thousands of more troops and escalate the war,” Biden stated. “That was the choice, the real choice, between leaving or escalating. I was not going to extend this forever war, and I was not extending a forever exit.”
Biden argued that the airlifts were mostly successful, despite some people being left behind, and mostly without casualties, despite last week’s Kabul airport attack that left 13 service members dead.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked whether Biden had made mistakes in the daily briefing held immediately after the speech.
“The president’s been pretty clear that we all had an expectation that the Afghan national security forces would fight harder,” she said. “We all had an expectation that President Ghani would not flee the country.”
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“You can spend a lot of time looking in the rearview mirror,” Psaki said. “What our focus now is on moving forward on our diplomatic effort, settling Afghan refugees … who are coming to the United States.”
You can watch Biden’s remarks in full below.
