“I stand squarely behind my decision”: Biden breaks silence on Afghanistan

In his first comments on Afghanistan in almost a week, President Joe Biden said “I stand squarely behind my decision” to pull American troops out of Afghanistan by the end of the month.

“I will not repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past,” President Biden said. “Mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely in a conflict is not in the national interest of the United States, of doubling down on a civil war in a foreign country. Or attempting to remake a country through the endless military deployments of U.S. forces.”

Biden’s comments come less than a day after the Taliban took over the Afghan capital of Kabul, and on the same day at least seven died trying to escape the country.

“Nobody here at the Pentagon is happy about the images that we’ve seen coming out in the last few days, and we’re all mindful of the kind of governance that the Taliban is capable of,” Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said after Biden was done speaking Monday.

Both Kirby and Biden admitted to not expecting how quickly the Taliban would take over Afghanistan. Both put at least a share of the blame on the Afghan government and security forces.

“One of the things that we couldn’t anticipate and didn’t anticipate was the degree to which Afghan forces capitulated, sometimes without a fight,” Kirby said.

In his remarks, Biden said the takeover actually helps his argument for leaving. “If anything, the developments of the past week reinforce that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision,” Biden said. “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.”

Biden went onto say “If Afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance to the Taliban now, there is no chance that one year, one more year, five more years or 20 more years of U.S. military boots on the ground would have made any difference.”