President Joe Biden now says that he cannot envision a scenario where America withdrew all military personnel from Afghanistan “without chaos ensuing.”
The president sat down with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos Wednesday for his first interview since the Taliban toppled the Afghan government and stated that “the idea that somehow, there’s a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing — I don’t know how that happens.”
EXCLUSIVE: Pressed on whether the U.S.’s exit from Afghanistan could have been handled better, Pres. Biden tells @GStephanopoulos, “The idea that somehow, there’s a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing—I don’t know how that happens.” https://t.co/mH1AyWI5lb pic.twitter.com/osAwdDQy2L
— ABC News (@ABC) August 18, 2021
In a preview clip published by ABC Wednesday evening, Stephanopoulos, a former White House spokesman himself, under Democratic President Bill Clinton, first asked the president if the American withdrawal led to the Taliban takeover “through a failure of intelligence, planning, execution, or judgment?”
“It was a simple choice,” Biden responded. “When you had the government of Afghanistan, the leader of that government, getting into a plane and taking to another country, when you saw the significant collapse of the Afghan troops we had trained, up to 300,000 of them just leaving their equipment and taking off, that’s what happened.”
“What I thought was we have to gain control of this. We have to move this more quickly,” he continued when asked about the photos and videos of Afghan nationals hanging on to U.S. aircraft taking off from the airport in Kabul. “We have to move in a way in which we can take control of that airport.”
“I don’t think it could have been handled in a way — we’re going to go back in hindsight and look, but the idea that somehow we could have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don’t know how that happens,” he concluded.
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ABC will air the full interview with the president later Wednesday night and Thursday morning.
