Biden claims Afghanistan withdrawal ‘extraordinary success’ in address to nation
In an address to the nation exactly 24 hours after he abruptly ended a chaotic evacuation of US troops from Afghanistan, a defensive and at times surly President Biden insisted the bug-out was an “extraordinary success,” despite the stranding of hundreds of American citizens and thousands of Afghan allies.
“As we close 20 years of war and strife and pain and sacrifice, it’s time to look to the future, not the past,” Biden said near the end of a 26-minute speech that was delivered in strident, occasionally angry tones and echoed earlier remarks justifying his decision to call home all US forces after nearly 20 years in Afghanistan.
Biden’s statement was initially scheduled for 1:30 p.m., then was pushed back to 2:45 p.m. and delayed a further 44 minutes. He began speaking at 3:29 p.m. ET, one day after the last American C-17 departed Kabul’s international airport. He did not take shouted questions from the White House press corps following the conclusion of his remarks.
The president repeated Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s estimate from a day earlier that between 100 and 200 Americans were left behind in Afghanistan who wish to leave. But he vowed that “there is no deadline” to get those US citizens out of Taliban-controlled territory.
And Biden maintained that the vast majority of Americans were able to depart the country despite vowing in an interview earlier this month that US troops would stay until “we get them all out.”
“The bottom line, 90 percent of Americans in Afghanistan who wanted to leave were able to leave,” Biden said before detailing the efforts the State Department had made to warn US citizens and friendly Afghans of the need to get out.
“Since March, we reached out 19 times to Americans in Afghanistan with multiple warnings and offers of help to leave Afghanistan – all the way back as far as March,” the president said with exasperation in his voice.
“In the 17 days we operated in Kabul after the Taliban seized power, we engaged in an around-the-clock effort to provide every American the opportunity to leave,” Biden added. “Our State Department was working 24/7, contacting and talking, and in some cases walking, Americans into the airport.”
Despite the frantic, almost panicked execution of the withdrawal, the president said he “respectfully” disagreed with critics who said evacuations could have begun earlier and been carried out in a more orderly fashion.
“Imagine if we’d begun evacuations in June or July, bringing in thousands of American troops and evacuating more than 120,000 people in the middle of a civil war,” an at times angry, shouting Biden said. “There still would have been a rush to the airport, a breakdown in competence and control of the government, and it still would have been a very difficult and dangerous mission.
“The bottom line is, there is no evacuation from the end of a war that you can run without the kinds of complexities, challenges and threats we faced, none,” he added.
As he had done in other statements, Biden attempted to shift the blame for the fiasco onto two parties: the US-backed government and former President Donald Trump.
“The Afghan security forces, after two decades of fighting for their country, and losing thousands of their own, did not hold as long as anyone expected,” the president lamented. “The people of Afghanistan watched their own government collapse and their president flee into corruption and malfeasance, handing over the country to their enemy, the Taliban and significantly increasing the risk to US personnel and our allies.”
Turning to Trump, Biden insisted that the cease-fire deal his predecessor’s administration reached with the Taliban in February 2020 – which enshrined a conditions-based withdrawal of US forces by May 1 of this year – left him with no good options.
“We were left with a simple decision: either follow through on the commitment made by the last administration and leave Afghanistan, or say we weren’t leaving and commit another tens of thousands more troops, going back to war,” the president said. “That was the choice, the real choice, between leaving or escalating.
“I was not going to extend this forever war.”
Trump has been vocal in condemning Biden’s handling of the withdrawal, most recently on Tuesday morning when he called out the president for abandoning the Bagram Air Base given its close proximity to China and also for leaving behind military equipment.
“We were all set to have a victory in terms of getting out and getting out with dignity… it was all lined up,” Trump told Fox Business.
“The Taliban were petrified of us, they were staying away. All you had to do was finish it up and take all the equipment out.”
Near the end of his remarks, while discussing the toll the war has taken on veterans, Biden started to mention the name of his late son, Beau, a veteran of the Iraq War who died of brain cancer in 2015.
“I don’t think enough people understand much we’ve asked of the one percent of this country who put that uniform on, willing to put their lives on the line in defense of our nation,” the president said. “Maybe it’s because my deceased son Beau, who served in Iraq for a full year, and before that …”
Biden then paused and resumed his speech, perhaps mindful that the mention of his late son had not gone over well with families of the US service members killed in last week’s terror attack at Hamid Karzai International Airport.
Congressional Republicans reacted to the president’s speech with contempt Tuesday, with Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) calling it an “unseemly victory lap” that was “detached from reality.”
“His callous indifference to the Americans he abandoned behind enemy lines is shameful,” Sasse said in a statement. “He promised the Taliban that our troops would leave by his arbitrary August 31st deadline, and he promised the American people that our troops would stay until every American was out. He kept his promise to the Taliban and lied to the American people. These lies will cost Americans for decades to come.”
When asked for an explanation of Biden’s angry tone and demeanor, White House press secretary Jen Psaki argued the president was merely making “a forceful case to the American people as to why it’s time to wind down that 20 year war that has led to the loss of thousands of lives.”
Moments after the final five US military transport planes lifted out of Kabul late Monday, the Taliban celebrated with a hail of gunfire and fireworks as they stormed the airport.
Footage released by the Taliban showed heavily armed fighters examining multiple Chinook helicopters, vehicles and weapons left behind by US troops at the airport.
The airport had become a US-controlled island as evacuations ramped up in the last two weeks after the Taliban seized control of the war-torn country on Aug. 15. Thousands of Afghans crowded the airport gates day after day, frantically waving identity papers. Some were caught in stampedes and crowd crushes, others clung to the outside of US military planes only to fall to their deaths as the aircraft rose into the sky.
The scope of the disaster grew on Aug. 26, when 13 US service members and more than 170 Afghans were killed in an ISIS suicide bomb blast outside the airport’s Abbey Gate.
More than 79,000 civilians were flown out of the airport on US military aircraft the last two weeks — including 6,000 Americans and 73,500 Afghans and third-country citizens.
The number of evacuated civilians grew to more than 123,000 when accounting for those flown out by members of the US-led coalition.
In addition to US citizens, thousands of at-risk Afghans who worked with the US government and military were believed to have been left behind.
