By Staff Writer
Facing sharp criticism over the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden said on Tuesday it was the best available option to end both the United States’ longest war and decades of fruitless efforts to remake other countries through military force.
Biden portrayed the turbulent exit as a logistical success that would have been just as messy even if it had been launched weeks earlier, while staying in the country would have required committing more American troops.
“I was not going to extend this forever war,” he said in a speech from the White House.
Earlier in the day, the Taliban, who seized control of Afghanistan in a lightning advance this month, celebrated their victory. They fired guns into the air, paraded coffins draped in U.S. and NATO flags and set about enforcing their rule after the last U.S. troops withdrew.
In his first remarks since the final pull-out on Monday, Biden said 90 percent of Americans who wanted to leave were able to do so, and that Washington had leverage over the Islamist militants to ensure 100 to 200 others could also depart if they wanted to.
He said Washington would continue to target militants in the country who posed a threat to the United States but would no longer use its military to try to build cohesive, democratic societies in places that have never had them.
“This decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries,” he said.
The Taliban now control more territory than when they last ruled before they were ousted in 2001 at the start of America’s longest war, which took the lives of nearly 2,500 U.S. troops and an estimated 240,000 Afghans and cost some $2 trillion.
More than 123,000 people were evacuated from Kabul in a massive but chaotic airlift by the United States and its allies over the past two weeks, but many of those who helped Western nations during the war were left behind.
Biden said the only other option would have been to step up the fight and continue a war that Americans soured on long ago. Starting the withdrawal in June or July, as some have suggested, would only have hastened the Taliban’s victory, he said.
U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said the departure had abandoned Americans behind enemy lines. “We are less safe as a result of this self-inflicted wound,” he said in his home state of Kentucky.
