On Saturday, Vice President Joe Biden defended his plan to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan by saying White House officials are going to keep an eye on the situation over the next few months. His comments come just a month after President Obama announced his plans to begin the withdrawal of all combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016. Biden said he didn’t want people to think the White House is ignoring what officials there say about the security situation.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Vice President Joe Biden said President Barack Obama and he have “complete confidence in the commander in chief” and that he will “make the right decision” on Afghanistan when the time comes. In the interview, Biden also said he will “defend and protect” the President and his decision to extend U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan, and said he believes the withdrawal could come as soon as next year.
Vice President Joe Biden’s recent declaration that President Barack Obama would make the final decision on a planned troop withdrawal from Afghanistan is a potentially troublesome reversal of Obama administration policy. The move has been met with some criticism, but Biden insists Obama has the constitutional authority to bypass Congress by launching a war in Afghanistan after 2014. “I don’t know if we’re gonna pull our troops out of Afghanistan tomorrow, but it won’t be up to him,” Biden said in an interview with The New Yorker. “This is up to the American people.” At a joint news conference Friday with Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, Biden exhibited a different attitude.. Read more about u.s. troops withdrawal from afghanistan 2021 and let us know what you think.
Washington, DC – President Biden said he stands “firmly behind” his decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan on Monday, but admitted that the country’s rapid collapse caught him off guard, telling the country that “the buck stops with me” as chaotic efforts to evacuate US personnel and Afghan allies from Kabul continue.
The president did little to address pressing questions about why the US failed to anticipate the rapid pace of the Taliban takeover or why the US was not prepared to evacuate Afghans who had aided US efforts over the years in his first address to the nation since the Taliban took control of the capital on Sunday. He stated that many Afghans who aided the US were not evacuated sooner because they did not want to leave and the Afghan government discouraged them from doing so. After his comments, the president took no questions and returned to Camp David on Monday afternoon.
Mr. Biden defended his timetable for removing US soldiers from the White House, saying, “I stand firmly by my decision.” “I’ve learned the hard way after 20 years that there was never a suitable moment to remove US troops.”
Mr. Biden started his comments by emphasizing that the goal in Afghanistan, which the US invaded in 2001 in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, was “never meant to be nation-building” and “never supposed to be establishing a united, centralized democracy.” He said that the main goal today is to prevent terrorist strikes on American soil. Mr. Biden told the nation that he “inherited” outgoing President Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Afghanistan by the end of May, and that his only options were to stick to the deal or intensify the war by deploying thousands more US soldiers to fight the Taliban.
On Tuesday, August 16, 2021, President Biden speaks in the East Room of the White House on the situation in Afghanistan. AFP/BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/Getty Images
“This did develop more rapidly than we had expected,” the president acknowledged. He said that Afghan authorities had given up and left the nation, and that the Afghan military had declined to resist the invading Taliban troops.
Mr. Biden said, “American soldiers cannot and should not be fighting and dying in a war that Afghan forces are unwilling to fight for themselves.”
According to the president, Obama told the Taliban that any assault on withdrawing US troops would be countered “with deadly force if required.”
Mr. Biden did briefly address why the United States did not remove its friends – Afghans who assisted the United States, such as translators — sooner. “Some Afghans did not want to go early, still optimistic for their nation,” he said, adding that the Afghan government “discouraged us from arranging a large exodus to prevent creating, as they put it, a ‘crisis of trust.’” However, the backlog of thousands of Afghan applications for special immigration visas contradicts this.
31:00 Special Report: Biden on Afghanistan
Despite placing blame on his predecessor and Afghan officials, Mr. Biden said he takes responsibility for the pullout, adding that he didn’t want a future president to be forced to make the same tough choice he made.
Mr. Biden said, “I am the president of the United States, and the buck stops with me.” “I am profoundly disturbed by the realities we now confront, but I do not regret America’s choice to finish its war in Afghanistan and retain a laser-like focus on our counterterrorism mission there and elsewhere.”
The situation in Kabul remains bleak and fluid. On Monday, a US military source told CBS News’ David Martin that US forces had killed two armed Afghans who were part of the massive throng that had overrun the airport perimeter, with reports claiming seven deaths in all. According to CBS News, approximately 100 embassy employees are still at the airport, running what is left of the embassy.
This story was co-written by Weijia Jiang, Ed O’Keefe, and Christina Ruffini.
Former Vice President Joe Biden said he has to make decisions on whether to stay in Afghanistan, but he “won’t leave until the job is done.” In a wide-ranging interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Biden said the Obama administration had to determine whether to continue military engagement in Afghanistan: “I’m not saying I’m not going to make a decision on Afghanistan. I’ve been thinking about it. I don’t think we can leave [there] and not have the capability to recover and to be able to survive and to be able to counter-attack and to be able to defeat.” He said that it was hard to withdraw from a war that has been “very costly to us,” but he said the time for a U. Read more about pros and cons of withdrawing troops from afghanistan and let us know what you think.
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