President Joe Biden admitted that the collapse of the Afghan government and the Taliban retaking control happened more quickly than the US government had anticipated, leading to the ongoing crisis playing out in front of the world.
President Joe Biden on Monday defended his decision to pull American troops out of Afghanistan, as he drew flak for the fall of the Central Asian country’s government.
“If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision,” Biden said in a speech at the White House.
He noted that Afghanistan’s political leaders “fled the country,” and the military collapsed, “sometimes without trying to fight.”
“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,” the president said.
The Taliban have swept into Kabul and triggered chaos at the capital city’s airport, bringing a stunning end to a two-decade campaign in which the U.S. and allies responded to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and tried to transform Afghanistan.
In his speech on Monday, Biden argued that further involvement in the country wouldn’t have helped much — and took some responsibility for the state of affairs.
“I will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little more time in Afghanistan will make all the difference, nor will I shrink from my share of responsibility for where we are today, and how we must move forward from here,” he said. “I am president of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me.”
The turn of events has sparked comparisons with the American withdrawal from Saigon as the Vietnam War ended. It comes just days after Biden was celebrating some progress on his push for domestic spending on traditional infrastructure PAVE, -0.15% — plus “human infrastructure” and other Democratic priorities.
“The political clout of the Biden administration will be diminished somewhat for a time — not completely, and not permanently, but exactly when it was most needed in September and October to push Democratic moderates into supporting Biden’s big expansion of the social safety net while simultaneously making giant investments to build out the clean energy ICLN, -0.80% economy,” said James Lucier, managing director at Capital Alpha Partners, in a note on Monday.