National security adviser Jake Sullivan said he “can’t make any guarantees” on whether the Islamic State will grow in power once U.S. forces withdraw from Afghanistan in the coming months.
“I can’t make any guarantees about what will happen inside the country. No one can,” Sullivan told Fox News’s Chris Wallace on Sunday when asked if terrorist threats in the region will expand without troops. “All the United States could do is provide the Afghan security forces, the Afghan government, and the Afghan people resources and capabilities, training and equipping their forces, providing assistance to their government. We have done that, and now, it is time for American troops to come home and the Afghan people to step up to defend their own country.”
Sullivan’s comments follow President Joe Biden’s Tuesday decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Biden’s move breaks from a peace agreement signed between the Trump administration and the Taliban that required the full U.S. troop withdrawal by May 1.
The national security adviser insisted that the administration will not be sending forces back to the embattled country, but the Pentagon isn’t planning on taking its “eye off the ball.”
BIDEN TO WITHDRAW TROOPS FROM AFGHANISTAN BY SEPT. 11
“I can tell you that President Biden has no intention of sending forces back to Afghanistan, but at the same time, he has no intention of taking our eye off the ball,” Sullivan said. “We have the capacity from repositioning our capabilities over the horizon to continue to suppress the terrorist threat in Afghanistan.”
The U.S. maintains roughly 2,500 troops and another 1,000 special forces in Afghanistan, working to root out terrorists and train Afghan security forces. NATO and partner forces provide another 7,000 troops and is expected to extract its forces per the Biden agreement.
Last week, Biden said terrorist threats have “become more dispersed, metastasizing around the globe” in Syria, Iraq, Africa, and Asia, adding that it “makes little sense” to focus troops in Afghanistan when threats are present elsewhere.
“With the terror threat now in many places, keeping thousands of troops grounded and concentrated in just one country at a cost of billions each year makes little sense to me and to our leaders,” Biden said. “We cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan, hoping to create ideal conditions for the withdrawal, and expecting a different result.”
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“I’m now the fourth United States president to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan: two Republicans, two Democrats. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth,” he continued.
On Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken defended the president’s decision.
“We went to Afghanistan 20 years ago, and we went because we were attacked on 9/11… we achieved the objectives that we set out to achieve,” he said.
