The president followed through on a campaign pledge to end the 20-year war in Afghanistan but spent much of his speech rebutting the evacuation's critics.
“We’ve been a nation too long at war. If you’re 20 years old today, you’ve never known an America at peace,” Biden said in a 26-minute speech from the White House’s State Dining Room.
“We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit. We’ll do it — we’ll do it responsibly, deliberately, and safely,” he said then, from the very room that former President George W. Bush had announced the start of airstrikes to remove the Taliban from power.Biden asserted Last week, an ISIS-K terrorist made it past Taliban checkpoints and detonated an explosive vest, murdering 13 U.S. service members and nearly 200 Afghans crowded together at an entry point.
Biden argued that if the U.S. had started ferrying its diplomats, other citizens and Afghan allies of the war effort earlier, that action would have triggered the collapse of the Afghan government earlier. “The bottom line is there is no evacuation from the end of a war that you can run without the kinds of complexities, challenges, and threats we faced. None,” he said.
He also suggested that American citizens and others wanting to leave the country had ignored months of guidance to do so in advance of the Aug. 14 Taliban takeover. “Since March, we reached out 19 times to Americans in Afghanistan with multiple warnings and offers to help them leave Afghanistan, all the way back, as far as March,” he said.
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