Biden defends Afghanistan decision, blames Afghan army’s unwillingness to fight

President Joe Biden has strongly defended his decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, and rejected broad criticism of the chaotic pullout that is posing a crisis for him.He said that the mission of the United States was never supposed to be nation building as he blamed the Taliban’s takeover of the country on the unwillingness of the Afghan army to fight the militant group.Thousands of civilians desperate to flee Afghanistan thronged Kabul airport’s single runway yesterday after the Taliban seized the capital, prompting the United States to suspend evacuations as it came under mounting criticism at home.Five people were reported killed in the chaos.A US official told Reuters that two gunmen had been killed by US forces there over the past 24 hours.“I am president of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me,” Biden said in a much-awaited televised address from the White House, after several days of silence on the momentous developments.“I stand squarely behind my decision,” he said. “After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw US forces. That’s why we’re still there.”“The truth is: this did unfold more quickly than we anticipated,” he admitted. “So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country.”“The Afghan military gave up, sometimes without trying to fight,” Biden added. “We gave them every chance to determine their own future. We could not provide them with the will to fight for that future.”The president reiterated, however, that the US national interest in Afghanistan was always principally about preventing terrorist attacks on the US homeland – and that America would continue to “act quickly and decisively” against any terror threat emanating from the country.The president coupled his defence with a warning to Taliban leaders: let the US withdrawal proceed unimpeded or face devastating force.Biden promised to prioritise the treatment of women and girls under the Taliban in Afghanistan.“We’ll continue to speak out on the basic rights of the Afghan people, of women and girls,” he said.Biden arrived in Washington yesterday after cutting short his vacation at his Camp David presidential retreat to address the nation on the US crisis in Afghanistan.All weekend the Democrat, who took office with more foreign policy experience than any new president in decades, stayed hunkered down at the secluded Camp David.As stunning images played out of Kabul, where a frantic US evacuation echoed the 1975 fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War, Biden was near invisible.His only statement came in written form on Saturday, insisting that the sudden US withdrawal from Afghanistan, triggering a Taliban total takeover, had been the only possible choice.Then as pressure mounted on Sunday for Biden to demonstrate that he was in charge, the White House issued a single photograph, showing the president in a polo shirt seated alone at a table while listening to advisers on a large monitor screen.Biden was elected last year on a promise to bring back expertise and responsibility after the turbulent Donald Trump years.A headline in the Washington Post read: “Defiant and defensive, a president known for empathy takes a cold-eyed approach to Afghanistan debacle.”The botched withdrawal and the Taliban’s lightning offensive also threw a political gift to Republicans.Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, described it as “a shameful failure of American leadership” and warned that “the likelihood that Al Qaeda will return to plot attacks from Afghanistan is growing”.He added: “A proud superpower has been reduced to hoping the Taliban will not interfere with our efforts to flee Afghanistan. God knows what fate awaits vulnerable Afghans who cannot make it to Kabul to board one of the final flights out. Terrorists and major competitors like China are watching the embarrassment of a superpower laid low.”Biden had been on a roll until this last week.Defying those who said Washington had become too dysfunctional for bipartisan dealmaking, Biden was celebrating the passage by the evenly divided Senate of his $1.2tn infrastructure bill.His Democrats were starting to work on a second, mind-bogglingly ambitious $3.5tn bill.And it was only a few weeks ago that Biden was congratulating Americans for their coronavirus (Covid-19) vaccination rates – a seeming victory over the coronavirus that the emerging Delta variant has now put in peril.Like the pandemic, Afghanistan was a crisis that Biden inherited.The US public has long lost interest in the fighting there and Trump tapped into powerful isolationist sentiment with a drive to extricate the country from “stupid” post-9/11 wars.Unlike on most other matters, Biden agreed with the Republican.In fact, Biden’s pullout is based almost entirely on a plan set in motion by Trump himself, who ordered negotiations with the Taliban and, if re-elected, had been teeing up an even earlier exit.Now beset by accusations of incompetence and betrayal, the White House is doubling down, insisting that the chaos in Kabul is actually the best of all the bad available options, because it at least stops an unwinnable war.“What the president was not prepared to do was to enter a third decade of conflict, throwing in thousands more troops – which as his only other choice,” Sullivan said. “The president had to make the best possible choice he could and he stands by that decision.”Meanwhile, Democrats have accused Trump and his allies of trying to “rewrite history”.Liz Cheney, a Republican member of the House armed services committee, acknowledged to CBS: “In the Trump administration the agreement that was negotiated, Secretary [of state Mike] Pompeo negotiated, actually was a surrender agreement … we never should have done that, but President Biden never should have withdrawn forces.”Ben Sasse, a Republican senator for Nebraska and fellow Trump critic, wrote in the National Review: “The sad thing is, many in my party are trying to blame-shift as if the last administration didn’t set us on this course.“Here’s the ugly truth: neither party is serious about foreign policy … president Trump pioneered the strategy of retreat President Biden is pursuing, to disastrous effect.”