A defiant President Joe Biden rejected blame Monday for chaotic scenes of Afghans clinging to US military planes in Kabul in a desperate bid to flee their home country after the Taliban's easy victory over an Afghan military that America and NATO allies had spent two decades trying to build.
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At the White House, Biden called the anguish of trapped Afghan civilians "gut-wrenching" and conceded the Taliban had achieved a much faster takeover of the country than his administration had expected. The US rushed in troops to protect its own evacuating diplomats and others at the Kabul airport.
But the president expressed no second thoughts about his decision to stick by the US commitment, formulated during the Trump administration, to end America's longest war, no matter what.
"I stand squarely behind my decision" to finally withdraw US combat forces, Biden said, while acknowledging the Afghan collapse played out far more quickly than the most pessimistic public forecasts of his administration. "This did unfold more quickly than we anticipated," he said.
Despite declaring "the buck stops with me" – Biden placed almost all blame on Afghans for the shockingly rapid Taliban conquest.
His grim comments were his first in-person to the world since the biggest foreign policy crisis of his still-young presidency. Emboldened by the US withdrawal, Taliban fighters swept across the country last week and captured the capital, Kabul, on Sunday, sending US-backed Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fleeing the country.
Biden said he had warned Ghani – who was appointed Afghanistan's president in a US-negotiated agreement – to be prepared to fight a civil war with the Taliban after US forces left. "They failed to do any of that," he said.
Internationally, the spectacle of the Taliban takeover and the chaos of the evacuation effort was raising doubts about America's commitments to its allies.
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