President Biden continues to reject criticism of his withdrawal from Afghanistan, saying in an interview released Sunday that “no one’s come up with a way to indicate to me” how to withdraw “without anybody getting hurt.”
Biden brought up Afghanistan in a recent interview saying that he had opposed the war from the beginning denying any responsibility for the disastrous withdrawal.
“Afghanistan. Well, I’ve been against that war in Afghanistan from the very beginning,” Biden said. “We’re spending $300 million a week in Afghanistan over 20 years.”
“Everybody says, ‘You could have gotten out without anybody being hurt,’” he continued. “No one’s come up with a way to indicate to me how that happens.”
Biden’s remarks about opposing the war “from the very beginning” reiterated remarks he made in a 2019 interview with the editorial board of New Hampshire’s Seacoast Media Group.
However Biden did not oppose the invasion of Afghanistan when he was a senator from Delaware and he along with his colleagues voted in support of the 2001 authorization of military force against “nations, organizations, or persons” that then-President George W. Bush determined to have helped perpetuate the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Biden has repeatedly spoke about his opposition to then-President Barack Obama’s “surge” of additional troops into Afghanistan during the time that he was vice president in 2009, however, is not the same as him being “against that war … from the very beginning.”
Critics have not primarily focused on the fact that Biden failed to have “gotten out without anybody being hurt” but instead for breaking his own promise not to leave Americans behind.
“If there are American citizens left, we’re gonna stay to get them all out,” Biden said in an interview on Aug. 16. However only 15 days later on Aug. 31, he marked the end of the war in Afghanistan by admitting that there were “about 100 to 200 Americans remaining in Afghanistan with some intention to leave.”
“What’s really troublesome and almost frightening to know is that we have a commander in chief who does not see the imperative of bringing the Americans home,” Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William “Jerry” said in an interview on Sept. 1. “That’s a longstanding ethos, not just of the military, but of America.”
Boykin as well as other retired military leaders called for the resignations of Biden’s top military and diplomatic officials, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and national security advisor Jake Sullivan, in the wake of the withdrawal.
Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, the former acting national security advisor to President Trump, previously said that the post-withdrawal disaster in Afghanistan is worse than the post-withdrawal situation in Iraq, from which the Islamic State emerged.
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