Biden Defends Afghanistan Withdrawal, Blames Kabul's Fall On Afghan Military, Leaders And Trump

President Joe Biden unapologetically defended his decision to withdraw U.S. military forces from Afghanistan, claiming it was not in the best interests of the American people to remain in an endless war while blaming the Taliban’s conquest of the nation on the Afghan military, the Afghan people and previous U.S. presidential administrations that conducted the military occupation of the Central Asian nation over the previous two decades.

What Went Wrong: “I stand squarely behind my decision,” Biden said in a speech delivered to the nation. “After 20 years, I've learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces. That's why we're still there.”

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Biden insisted that the initial mission in Afghanistan was to “get those who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001, and make sure al-Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again.”

He added that the U.S. mission was “never supposed to be a nation building, it was never supposed to be creating a unified centralized democracy. Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what has always been preventing a terrorist attack on the American homeland.”

Biden added the terrorist threat against U.S. interests shifted to elsewhere in Asia and Africa and the U.S. in conducting missions against terrorist groups in countries where it does not have a permanent military presence. He added that “if necessary, we'll do the same in Afghanistan.”

Furthermore, the president claimed he was boxed in by a 2020 agreement that his predecessor, Donald Trump, made with the Taliban to pull out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021.

“The choice I had to make as your president was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season,” he said. “We would have been no ceasefire after May 1. There was no agreement protecting our forces after May 1.”

While admitting that the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban “did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated,” he did not take any blame for strategic failings. Instead, he seemed to blame the Afghans solely for the misfortune that befell them.

“The Afghan military collapsed some time without trying to fight,” Biden said, noting that “America cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”

Biden blamed Afghanistan’s leadership for “being unable to come together for the good of their people [and] unable to negotiate for the future of their country.”

The president also insisted Afghan civilians didn't evacuate sooner because “some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier, still hopeful for their country, and part of it was because the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, a crisis of confidence.”

Biden stated that with U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, his administration will continue to put pressure on the Taliban.

“We will lead with our diplomacy, our international influence, and our humanitarian aid will continue to push for regional diplomacy and engagement to prevent violence and instability,” he said. “We'll continue to speak out for the basic rights of Afghan people, of women and girls — just as we speak out all over the world. I've been clear that human rights must be the center of our foreign policy, not the periphery.”

Biden stated he was willing to accept criticism for his decision and echoed Harry S. Truman by claiming “the buck stops with me.” He ended his speech by ignoring questions shouted by reporters and exiting back into the White House.

The president's speech covered many of the highlights in a White House Talking Points memo that Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin obtained earlier on Monday. The memo was sent to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for distribution to congressional Democrats.

One Month Earlier: The president’s comments echoed some of his statements from a July 8 speech where he insisted the time had come for the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan to conclude.

“We went for two reasons: one, to bring Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell, as I said at the time,” Biden said. “The second reason was to eliminate al-Qaida’s capacity to deal with more attacks on the United States from that territory. We accomplished both of those objectives. Period. That’s why I believe this is the right decision and quite frankly overdue.”

In taking questions from reporters during the July 8 presentation, Biden insisted a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan would not resemble the chaotic final days of the Vietnam War when U.S. military helicopters conducted evacuations from the rooftop of the U.S. embassy in Saigon.

“There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy,” Biden said then. “It is not at all comparable.”

However, images of U.S. military helicopters evacuating embassy personnel in Kabul created an uncomfortable mirror image to the 1975 humiliation in Saigon, while video footage of Afghans clinging to U.S. military jets as they tried to take off — with some people holding on and then falling to the deaths as the aircraft went into flight — added a new degree of horror to the situation in the Afghan capital.

Taking Responsibility: The sudden collapse of the government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who fled the country on Sunday ahead of the Taliban’s movement into the capital city, caught the Biden administration off-guard. While the administration never assumed the Ghani government could defeat the Taliban — an unnamed administration source told the Washington Post on Aug. 10 that Kabul could fall within 90 days — the speed of the Taliban’s success was disconcerting.

Still, the administration appeared to be building a defense for any potential foreign policy embarrassment with a written statement on Saturday attributed to Biden that put much of the blame on the current state of Afghan affairs on Trump:

“When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor - which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019 – that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on U.S. forces. Shortly before he left office, he also drew U.S. forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500. Therefore, when I became president, I faced a choice – follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our forces and our allies’ forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict. I was the fourth President to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan – two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.”

Outside of the aforementioned written statement and a White House photo of the president sitting alone in a Camp David conference room while conducting a videoconference with members of his national security advisors, the Biden administration mostly kept an uncommonly low profile over the weekend as the news from Kabul emerged.

Neither Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris nor Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III were seen in public, and emailed media inquiries to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki were answered by an automated message that said she was on vacation for the week of Aug. 15.

Instead, Secretary of State Antony Blinken became the administration’s public face, addressing the situation on Sunday morning news programs. Blinken bristled at Vietnam War references, telling ABC’s "This Week", “This is not Saigon. The fact of the matter is this: We went to Afghanistan 20 years ago with one mission in mind. That was to deal with the people that attacked us on 9/11. That mission has been successful.”

Blinken told NBC’s "Meet the Press" that the president’s decision to exit Afghanistan was the right decision.

“Twenty years, $1 trillion, 2,300 Americans who lost their lives, a massive investment,” Blinken said. “And the president concluded that it was time to end this war. As a strategic matter, there is nothing that our strategic competitors would like more than to see us bogged down and mired in Afghanistan for another five, 10, 20 years. That is not in the national interest.”

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan also made appearances on television Monday morning, echoing Blinken's comments.

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Predecessor Response: Neither former Presidents George W. Bush (who ordered the 2001 Afghanistan invasion) nor Barack Obama (whose administration pursued 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan to Pakistan, where he was killed in a raid on his compound by U.S. special military operation), issued public comments on the unfolding Afghan crisis.

Last month, Bush gave an interview to Germany’s DW News warning that a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan would be a mistake because many Afghan women and girls faced a return to brutal treatment by the Taliban and the locals who worked with the U.S. military over the past two decades had no guarantee of safe passage out of the country.

“It seems like they're going to be left behind to be left behind to be slaughtered by these very brutal people,” Bush said. “It breaks my heart.”

Fox News reported that Obama’s Instagram page briefly shut off its comments function when it began receiving messages from his social media audience to speak out on Afghanistan; former First Lady Michelle Obama's Instagram page also had its comments section temporarily closed for the same reason.

Trump called on Biden to resign and condemned the handling of the U.S. withdrawal.

“Afghanistan is the most embarrassing military outcome in the history of the United States,” Trump said in a statement. “It didn’t have to be that way! Can anyone even imagine taking out our Military before evacuating civilians and others who have been good to our Country and who should be allowed to seek refuge?”

Photo: President Biden speaking on the Afghanistan crisis, courtesy of the White House.