'Won't repeat mistakes': US stands by decision to withdraw from Afghanistan

US President Joe Biden on Tuesday (August 17) expressed surprise over the pace at which Taliban took control of Afghanistan while insisting that he remains “squarely behind” his decision to withdraw troops from the troubled nation.

Addressing the US citizens amid growing criticism over his decision to leave Afghan people at the mercy of the Talibanis, Biden asked, “How many more American lives is it worth?”

“I will not repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past — the mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely in a conflict that is not in the national interests of the United States, of doubling down on a civil war in a foreign country, of attempting to remake a country through the endless military deployments of U.S. forces,” Biden said.

The US president tried to play down the charge that US could have chosen some other time to pull out, saying, “there was never a good time to withdraw US forces”.

The Taliban are back in the saddle after 20 long years as Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country two days back. The US began withdrawing forces from Afghanistan in April as per a decision taken by erstwhile US President Donald Trump.

Biden, however, insisted that he is not running away from his responsibility. “I am president of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me,” he said while pulling up the Afghan government for buckling under Taliban pressure. “We gave them every chance to determine their own future. (What) we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future,” Biden said.

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“If anything, the developments of the past week reinforce that ending US military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision….American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves,” he said.

Biden said he was the fourth US president to be in charge as the country waged its longest war, but said he would not like to pass on the responsibility to his successor. “I will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little more time in Afghanistan will make all the difference.”

Biden emphasised that the US never planned to take up “nation-building exercise in the US”. He said, “When I was vice-president I had opposed the 2009 deployment of thousands more troops into the country by former President Barack Obama.”

Meanwhile, voices expressing concern over US withdrawal from Afghanistan grew louder as pictures and videos of desperate Afghans clinging onto a US military force leaving Kabul became viral.

If a picture could describe how Joe Biden is handling the withdrawal of troops in Afghanistan: pic.twitter.com/Rl8qDVrYyp

— Jillian Anderson (@Jillie_Alexis) August 16, 2021

Former US President George W Bush, who ordered the military offensive in Afghanistan in 2001, said he was “watching the tragic events unfolding in Afghanistan with deep sadness”.

20 years of American Planning

4 presidents
Trillions of Dollar spent

Just to Replace Taliban with Taliban #JoeBiden #BidenDisaster pic.twitter.com/AWkLBX4ur9

— Narad  (@dtweetofNarad) August 17, 2021

Republican and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell tweeted: “What we have seen is an unmitigated disaster — a stain on the reputation of the United States of America.”

Despite widespread criticism, citizen polls in the US show an overwhelming support for Biden’s decision to stick to former US president Donald Trump’s call to withdraw from Afghanistan.