Biden speech: President defends US exit from Afghanistan, pledging ‘no deadline’ to evacuate Americans

The president said he does not believe mass evacuations from Kabul should have started sooner, arguing that any announcement prior to an approaching withdrawal date could have sparked a “rush to the airport.”

“I take responsibility for the decision,” he said.

He added: “Imagine if we began evacuations in June or July, bringing in thousands of American troops and evacuating more than 120,000 people in the middle of a civil war. There still would have been a rush to the airport, a break down in confidence and control of the government and still would have been very difficult and dangerous mission.”

“The bottom line is there is no evacuation from the end of a war that you can run without the kinds of complexities, challenges, threats we faced,” he said. “None.”

President Joe Biden offered his strongest defence yet for his administration’s management of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan on Tuesday, hours after the last US planes left the country.

In a national address from the White House marking the end of the US occupation of Afghanistan, Mr Biden explained that he was not ready to let a “forever war” turn into a “forever exit”, while arguing that the US managed to extract most Americans from the country before the final flights departed.

“I was not going to extend this forever war, and I was not extending a forever exit,” the president declared.

John Bowden reports from Washington DC:

Biden has signalled US military focus in the aftermath of the occupation in Afghanistan will rely on remote strikes, announcing that the US “will maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries.”

“We just don’t need to fight a ground war to do it,” he added. “To Isis-k, we aren’t done with you yet.”

The US will pursue a “tough, unforgiving, precise strategy” that attacks “where terror is today, not where it was two decades ago.”

US withdrawal from the occupation of Afghanistan “isn’t just about Afghanistan,” Biden said.

“It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries,” he said in his national address.

“We no longer had a clear purpose in an open-ended mission in Afghanistan,” Biden said. “Moving on from that mindset and those kind of large-scale troop deployments will make us stronger and more effective and safer at home.”

A survey performed in the days leading up to the final withdrawal of US troops in Afghanistan found that a majority of Americans – 54 per cent – believe the decision to exit is the right one, while 42 per cent describe Biden’s handling of the mission as “poor.”

Only six per cent of respondents say the administration did an “excellent” job, according to the Pew Research survey, while roughly 50 per cent would describe the handling of US withdrawal as “good” or “only fair.”

Views on the administration’s efforts as well as Taliban threats also largely reflect party affiliation, unsurprisingly – 64 per cent of Republicans don’t support withdrawal, and 61 per cent believe the Taliban poses a security threat to the US, according to the poll.

The mother of Kabul blast victim Kareem Nikoui has been unbanned from Instagram after the company said it had removed her account by accident.

Shana Chappell said her account was deleted after posting a tribute to her son followed by criticism of Joe Biden to Facebook, which owns Instagram. In a statement to The Independent, a Facebook spokesperson confirmed the removal of her account but said it was a mistake.

“We express our deepest condolences to Ms Chappell and her family. Her tribute to her heroic son does not violate any of our policies,” the statement said. The Independent’s Justin Vallejo has more here.

Midway through President Joe Biden’s speech announcing the end of the US military mission in Afghanistan, he appeared to outline a unitary “Biden doctrine” for US foreign policy as America ends its longest war.

“First, we must set missions with clear, achievable goals, not ones we’ll never reach,” he said. “We must stay clearly focused on the fundamental national security interests of the United States of America.”

Throughout Mr Biden’s speech, wherein he outlined the failures of the Afghan government before it fell to the Taliban and the shortcomings of his predecessor Donald Trump, the president continuously emphasised why longterm military commitments like the one in Afghanistan were not in America’s best interests.

The Independent’s Eric Garcia has more analysis here.

This will be the one that goes in the history books.

On Tuesday, president Biden passionately defended his administration’s handling of the Afghanistan conflict, and sought more broadly to define what comes next for America in the Middle East after the conclusion of its longest modern war. Read the full speech here.

A group of eight San Diego families, including nearly two dozen school children, has largely been able to escape Afghanistan after being trapped in the country in the final days of the US withdrawal, school authorities have confirmed to The Independent.

Out of the eight families who were once stuck in Afghanistan, many of whom are dual nationals who were visiting family, seven have made it out, the Cajon Valley Union School District said on Tuesday afternoon.

Four families are back in the El Cajon area, two are in the US and flying home, and one is safely on their way to America.

One family, including three students, remains in the country.

Catch up on our previous coverage of the case here.