“I stand squarely behind my decision” to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden has said in his first public comments in a national address Monday since the Taliban took full control of the country.
President Biden said he made it clear to the Taliban that “if they attack our personnel or disrupt our operation, the U.S. presence will be swift, and the response will be swift and forceful.
“We will defend our people with devastating force if necessary, he said.
Biden said the collapse of the Afghan government amid the Taliban’s rapid advance “did unfold more quickly than we anticipated”.
Biden admitted that his administrition underestimated the pace of the Taliban’s advance.
But he also pointed to the Afghan military giving up key cities without a fight in recent days, and argued that while the US had trained and equipped Afghan security forces, they could not give them the will to fight for their futu
“My national security team and I have been closely monitoring the situation and quickly responding to it, including the rapid collapse of the government in Afghanistan,” US president Joe Biden said.
Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on the American homeland- President Biden.
“We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on September 11th, 2001, and make sure al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again,” Biden said.
“We did that. We severely degraded al Qaeda in Afghanistan. We never gave up the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and we got him. That was a decade ago,” he added.
“Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy, Biden said. “Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on the American homeland.”
“I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you. The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated,” Biden said in a national address.
We’ll continue to speak out on the basic rights of the Afghan people, of women and girls- Biden said in a national address.
“We gave them every chance to determine their own future. We could not provide them with the will to fight for that future.”
“If anything, the developments of the past week reinforce that ending US military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision. American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves,” US president Joe Biden said.
“We have safely shut down our embassy and transferred our diplomats.
“Our diplomatic presence is now consolidated at the airport as well,” he said.
He also said that over the next few days, the US intends to transport out thousands of American citizens who have been living and working in Afghanistan.
“We’ll also continue to support the safe departure of civilian personnel — the civilian personnel of our Allies who are still serving in Afghanistan.”
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