Biden says experience guided him on Afghanistan withdrawal: ‘There was never a good time’
President Joe Biden argued Monday that his decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan remains the right one despite the harrowing scenes emerging from Kabul — and that his experience with the country during 20 years of war helped guide him.
“I’ve worked on these issues as long as anyone,” Biden said from the White House. “I’ve spoken to the leaders. I spent time with our troops. And I came to understand firsthand what was and was not possible in Afghanistan.”
But that experience is drawing scrutiny as the president navigates the first major global crisis of his presidency, with the Taliban overrunning Afghanistan in mere days and forcing a hurried American evacuation.
Biden’s time as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his eight years as vice president crystallized in him a resolve to end the war after al Qaeda, which was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, was “severely degraded” there, he said in an address to the nation.
“I stand squarely behind my decision,” Biden said. “After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces.”
Biden’s critics say his insistence on a full and swift withdrawal from Afghanistan was just the latest example of his defiance of military advice — part of a pattern of tensions with Pentagon leadership that reached an inflection point this weekend, when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan’s capital.
Two officials told McClatchy that the president was advised by Pentagon leadership to maintain a small force of several thousand troops in the country for counterterrorism and surveillance — a proposal the president rejected.
Inside the Pentagon, one official said there was “sadness and anger” throughout the building over the chaotic end to the country’s longest war.
White House officials have pointed out that Pentagon assessments just hours before the fall of Kabul indicated the city was safe and calm for the time being.
Biden as vice president opposed the military’s proposed options to surge troops in Afghanistan — a route that President Barack Obama took in order to protect Afghans from the Taliban while the United States trained and equipped a domestic security force.
That force — which at its peak was supposed to include 300,000 trained Afghan soldiers, equipped with American arms — melted away over the last few days, Biden pointed out in his speech.
“I’ve argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counterterrorism — not counterinsurgency or nation building,” Biden said. “That’s why I opposed the surge when it was proposed in 2009 when I was vice president. And that’s why as president, I am adamant that we focus on the threats we face today in 2021, not yesterday’s threats.”
That internal debate over surging troops in 2009 created a divide that has lasted for years.
When Biden began running for president in 2019, Bob Gates, defense secretary under Obama, told CBS that he stood by an assertion in his memoir that Biden had been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
“We disagreed significantly on Afghanistan and some other issues,” Gates said. “I think that the vice president had some issues with the military. So how he would get along with the senior military, and what that relationship would be, I just, I think it would depend on the personalities at the time.”
Some members of Biden’s own party are now expressing concern that the president’s focus on a speedy withdrawal failed to account for the sort of dramatic scenario now unfolding.
“They’re still in the process of trying to get this right — or at least less wrong,” said Jason Kander, a former Missouri secretary of state who served as an Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2007 and now leads the Kansas City-based Veterans Community Project. “That is the reality. After 20 years, it’s about trying to get the situation less wrong.”
Rep. David Price, a North Carolina Democrat who has worked closely with members of the Afghan parliament through the House Democracy Partnership, said Biden’s decision to set a specific withdrawal date without preconditions left the country’s democratic institutions vulnerable.
“Declaring that you’re going to pull out and essentially leave the Afghans to their own devices and giving a date certain without conditions … I think it’s very tempting for the Taliban to wait us out, which is exactly what they did,” said Price, who has served more than three decades in Congress.
Criticism from other Democrats have focused on the chaotic nature of the withdrawal and the optics of a retreat from the U.S. Embassy, which Secretary of State Antony Blinken had insisted weeks earlier would remain open and fully operating even after all U.S. troops had departed.
Former Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican whose long Senate tenure overlapped with Biden, said he had expected foreign policy to be a source of weakness for the president.
“I always thought this would be his Achilles heel,” Roberts said. “I think he did what he did because he thought it was the right thing to do and politically the right thing to do. Now it has boomeranged around.”
This story was originally published August 16, 2021 at 7:45 PM.
