Defiant Biden defends US flight from Afghanistan

President Biden has said he stands “squarely behind” his decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan – blaming Donald Trump and the Afghanistan security services for the Taliban’s rapid takeover.

Returning on Monday to the White House to make his first public remarks on Afghanistan in nearly a week, Biden defended his decision to bring back US troops, despite scenes of chaos as residents scrambled to evacuate Kabul:

“Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country; the Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight… If anything, the developments of the past week reinforce that ending US military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.”

Biden said the mission had never been about nation-building but counter-terrorism – a threat that has now “metastasised” well beyond Afghanistan.

He insisted he did not “regret” the decision to pull out of Afghanistan, saying it would be wrong to take the US into a third decade of military engagement in the country.

The President admitted that the situation “did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated” and said “‘I am President of the United States of America... and the buck stops with me.”

However, Biden did place some of the blame for the Taliban’s rapid takeover on political leaders who fled the country and the Afghan army’s unwillingness to fight.

“American troops cannot and should not be fighting the war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”

Biden also blamed his predecessor, Donald Trump, for empowering the Taliban and leaving them “in the strongest position militarily since 2001”.

The address came after a day of chaos in Kabul prompted heavy criticism from all sides of the political spectrum. 

Seven people died at the capital’s main airport on Monday as desperate Afghans surged onto the runway, some clinging to the wheels of departing US aircraft. Two fell to their deaths after planes took off. Some 640 Afghans clambered onto a US C-17 cargo jet designed to carry 150 before troops could close the door. It took off anyway, ferrying the refugees to Qatar. Thousands more were not so lucky.

Republican congressmen said the situation amounted to “the embarrassment of a superpower laid low” and demanded an investigation. They were joined by several Democrats and former Obama administration officials who publicly criticised Biden’s handling of the situation. 

Ryan Crocker, who was ambassador to Afghanistan in the Obama administration, said the Biden administration had “a total lack of coordinated, post-withdrawal planning,” and that the predicament was a “self-inflicted wound.”

After the conference, Biden walked away without taking press questions and returned to the presidential country retreat, Camp David.