CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
WE’VE DONE ALL WE CAN: US President Joe Biden says he stands squarely behind his decision to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan, after rebel forces seized power in just over a week.
The US-funded Taliban overpowered US-trained Afghan Armed Forces and swept into Afghanistan’s capital Sunday, after the US-backed Afghan government imploded and the embattled president joined an exodus of his fellow citizens and foreigners.
Mr Biden said the fall of Kabul was quicker than anticipated, but insisted the 20 year war that saw hundreds of thousands of deaths, was worth it and America achieved their two missions.
The first mission was to seek vengeance against Osama Bin Laden, who was hiding out with his family in Pakistan the entire time, for the 9/11 World Trade Centre Attacks.
The second mission was to apparently make sure Al-Qaeda did not spread across Afghanistan, which would have apparently been much worse than what is happening now, as the US flees the war-torn country after spending $300 million per day for two decades.
Mr Biden said he would not repeat “the mistakes of the past” by fighting in a conflict that was no longer in the interests of the United States, after he was able to secure a second term as Vice President under Obama in 2011 when the Navy Seals successfully assassinated Bin Laden in a completely different country that most of America just assumed was Afghanistan.
Biden said the collapse of the US-trained Afghan armed forces in their efforts to protect the US-backed Afghan Government from the US-trained Taliban warlords was a sign that the withdrawal was the right decision.
“The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated” said Biden.
“We did not expect the Taliban, which was founded by the former Mujahedin fighters that the CIA funded heavily in the 1980s in a covert operation aimed at taking down the Soviet Empire, would be so succesful in their efforts to overthrow the Afghan government that we instated after we took over this place”
“All they had to do was defeat the US-trained Afghan military that I believe didn’t work hard enough to protect the government that we told them was in power”
