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Joe Biden said Thursday that the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan will end on Aug. 31, defending its decision withdraw American troops after more than 20 years of fighting despite the threat of a resurgent Taliban.
“I will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan without any reasonable expectation of achieving a different outcome,” the president said as he spoke from the White House.
Biden said the country had met its goals of finding Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda and the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks, and that it had weakened the terrorist threat on the mainland. of the United States from Afghanistan.
“That’s why we went. We didn’t go to Afghanistan to build the nation, ”he said.
It would now be up to the Afghan people to “decide their future” and “how they want to lead their country,” he said, but the prospect of keeping U.S. troops there “only one more year,” as some of the his critics urged him to do, “it was not a solution.”
Biden ‘s comments come a week after US withdrew from its main military base in Afghanistan, even when a resurgent Taliban has gained territory.
The Taliban have launched numerous offensives against Afghan forces and civilians, while the peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government that began in September 2020 have failed to produce a political agreement or a ceasefire.
General Austin Miller, the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, warned that the country could fall into a worsening of the civil war during a press conference last week.
Eighty of Afghanistan’s approximately 400 districts had fallen under Taliban control since May, said Mir Haider Afzaly, a deputy and chairman of the Afghan parliament’s defense committee.
Biden on Thursday denied that U.S. intelligence agencies had predicted the impending fall of the Afghan government. “The Afghan government needs to come together, of course they have the capacity to maintain the government,” he said, referring to military forces and equipment. “The question is will they generate the kind of cohesion to do that?”
He later added that the likelihood of “a unified government… Controlling the whole country” was “very unlikely.”
“Afghanistan has never been a united country, not even in its entire history,” Biden said.
The president, along with his vice president Kamala Harris, were briefed Thursday morning by the administration’s national security team on the progress of the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The Afghan army will take control of Bagram airfield, the vast base that was the center of its national command in the country, following the withdrawal of most US troops.
Biden pledged again to Afghan nationals to have him worked side by side U.S. forces would be eligible for “drastically accelerated” entry into the U.S.
Earlier Thursday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the United States “did not have a mission accomplished.”
“It’s a 20-year war that hasn’t been won militarily,” he said.
Additional reports by Lauren Fedor
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