Full text of Joe Biden’s speech on withdrawal from Afghanistan

Joe Biden has defended his decision to pull US armed forces out of Afghanistan, as images of the chaos unfolding in Kabul as the Taliban took power spread around the world.

At least eight people died on Monday at Kabul’s main airport, and people mobbed the runway trying to force their way onto military evacuation flights. All civilian air travel out of the city has been suspended.

In remarks at the White House, Mr Biden blamed the country’s rapid collapse mostly on its own political leaders and military, even though the US has been occupying Afghanistan and influencing its affairs for two decades.

“I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you,” the president said. “The truth is this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what’s happened? Afghanistan’s political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight.”

Read the full transcript of the president’s speech, as compiled by transcription firm Rev, below:

Good afternoon. I want to speak today to the unfolding situation in Afghanistan, the developments that have taken place in the last week and the steps we’re taking to address the rapidly evolving events. My national security team and I had been closely monitoring the situation on the ground in Afghanistan and are moving quickly to execute the plans we had put in place to respond to every constituency, including any contingency, including the rapid collapse we’re seeing. Now I’ll speak more in a moment about the specific steps we’re taking, but I want to remind everyone how we got here and what America’s interests are in Afghanistan. We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals. Get those who attacked us on September 11th, 2001, and make sure Al-Qaida could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack. Again. We did that. We severely degraded Al-Qaida in Afghanistan.

We never gave up the hunt for Osama bin Laden. And we got him. That was a decade ago. Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy. Our only vital national interests in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on American Homeland. I’ve argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counter terrorism, not counterinsurgency or nation building. 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’m adamant, we focus on the threats we face today in 2021, not yesterday’s threats. The terrorist threat has metastasized well beyond Afghanistan, El Shabaab in Somalia, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula on the loose in Syria, ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates in multiple countries in Africa and Asia.

These threats warrant our attention and our resources. We conduct effective counter-terrorism missions against terrorist groups in multiple countries where we don’t have permanent military presence. If necessary, we’ll do the same in Afghanistan. We’ve developed counter-terrorism over their rising of capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on the direct threats to the United States in the region and act quickly and decisively if needed. When I came into office, I inherited a deal that president Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Under his agreement, US forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1st, 2021, just a little over three months after I took office, US forces that were already drawn down during the Trump administration from roughly 15,500 American forces to 2,500 troops in country. And the Taliban was at its strongest militarily since 2001. The choice I had to make as your president was either to follow through on that agreement, or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season. There would have been no ceasefire after May 1.

There was no agreement protecting our forces after May one, there was no status quo of stability without American casualties. After May one, there was only a cold reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, lurching into the third decade of conflict. I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw US forces. That’s why we’re still there. We were clear-eyed about the risks we plan for every contingency, but I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you. The truth is this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what’s happened. Afghanistan’s political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight.

If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced 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. We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong, incredibly well-equipped, a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies. We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force. Something that Taliban doesn’t have. The Taliban does not have an air force. We provided close air support. We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future. There’s some very brave and capable Afghan special forces, units, and soldiers.

But Afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance to the Taliban now, there is no chance that one year, one more year, five more years or 20 more years of US military boots in the ground would have made any difference. Here’s what I believe to my core. It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not. The political leaders of Afghanistan were unable to come together for the good of their people, are unable to negotiate for the future of their country. When the chips were down, they would never have done so while US troops remained in Afghanistan, bearing the brunt of the fighting for them. And our true strategic competitors, China and Russia, would love nothing more than the United States to continue to funnel billions of dollars in resources and attention into stabilizing Afghanistan indefinitely.

When I hosted the president Ghani and chairman of Abdullah at the White House in June, and again, when I spoke by phone to Ghani in July, we had very frank conversations. We talked about how Afghanistan should prepare to fight their civil wars after the U S military department, to clean up the corruption in government. So the government could function for the Afghan people. We talked extensively about the need for Afghan leaders to unite politically. They failed to do any event. I also urged them to engage in diplomacy, to seek a political settlement with the Taliban. This advice was flatly refused. Mr. Ghani insisted that the Afghan forces would fight, but obviously he was wrong.

So I’m left again to ask of those who argue that we should stay: How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to the fight Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghan troops will now? How many American lives is it worth? How many endless rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery. I’m clear on my answer. I will not repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past. The mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely in a conflict is not in the national interest of the United States, nor is doubling down on a civil war in a foreign country or attempting to remake a country through the endless military deployments of US forces. Those are the mistakes we can not continue to repeat because we have significant vital interest in the world that we cannot afford to ignore.

I also want to acknowledge how painful this is for so many of us. The scenes we’re seeing in Afghanistan. They’re gut-wrenching, particularly for our veterans, our diplomats, humanitarian workers, for anyone who has spent time on the ground, working to support the Afghan people, or those who have lost loved ones in Afghanistan, and for Americans who have fought and served in the country, served our country in Afghanistan. This is deeply, deeply personal. It is for me as well. I’ve worked on these issues as long as anyone. I’ve been throughout Afghanistan during this war, while the war was going on, from Kabul to Kandahar to the Qunar valley. I’ve traveled there on four different occasions. I’ve met with the people. 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. So now we’re focused, focused on what is possible.

We will continue to support the Afghan people. We will lead with our diplomacy, our international influence and our humanitarian aid. We’ll continue to push for regional diplomacy and engagement to prevent violence and instability. We’ll continue to speak out for the basic rights of Afghan people, of women and girls, just as we speak out all over the world, I’ve been clear that human rights must be the center of our foreign policy, not the periphery, but the way to do it is not through endless military deployments. So with our diplomacy or economic tools and rallying the world to join us, well, let me lay out the current mission in Afghanistan.

I was asked to authorize and I did 6,000 us troops to deploy to Afghanistan for the purpose of assisting the departure of US and allied civilian personnel from Afghanistan, and to evacuate our Afghan allies and vulnerable Afghans to safety outside of Afghanistan. Our troops are working to secure the airfield and ensure continued operation of both the civilian and military flights. We’re taking over our air traffic control. We have safely shut down our embassy and transferred our diplomats. Our diplomatic presence is now consolidated at the airport as well. Over the coming days, we intend to transport out thousands of American citizens who’ve been living and working in Afghanistan. We’ll also continue to support the safe departure of civilian personnel, the civilian personnel of our allies, who are still serving Afghanistan. Operation Allies Refugee, which I announced back in July, has already moved 2000 Afghans who are eligible for special immigration visas and their families to the United States.

In the coming days, the US military will provide assistance to move more SIV eligible Afghans and their families out of Afghanistan. We’re also expanding refugee access to cover other vulnerable Afghans who worked for our embassy, US non-governmental organizations and Afghans who otherwise are at great risk in US news agencies. I know there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghan civilians sooner. Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier, still hopeful for their country and part of it because the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged the US from organizing a mass exodus to avoid “triggering, as they said, a crisis of confidence. American troops are performing this mission as professionally and as effectively as they always do, but it is not without risks. As we carry out this departure, we’ve made it clear to the Taliban that if they attack our personnel or disrupt our operation, the US presence will be swift, and the response will be swift and forceful. We would defend our people with devastating force if necessary in our current military mission, with shortened time, limited scope and focused on its objectives: get our people and our allies as safely and quickly as possible. And once we have completed this mission, we will conclude our military withdrawal will end America’s longest war. After 20 long years of bloodshed, the events we’re seeing now are sadly proof that no amount of military force would ever deliver a stable, united, secure Afghanistan, as known in history as the graveyard of empires. What’s happening now could just as easily happen five years ago, or 15 years in the future, you have to be honest. Our mission in Afghanistan has taken many missteps, made many missteps over the past two decades. I’m now the fourth American president to preside over war in Afghanistan, two Democrats, and two Republicans. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth president. I will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little more time in Afghanistan will make all the difference, nor will I shrink from my share of responsibility for where we are today and how we must move forward from here. I am president of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me.

I’m deeply saddened by the facts we now face, but I do not regret my decision to end America’s war fighting Afghanistan, and maintain a laser focus on our counter-terrorism missions there and other parts of the world. Our mission to degrade the terrorist threat of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and kill Osama bin Laden was a success. Our decades-long effort to overcome centuries of history and permanently change and remake Afghanistan was not. And I wrote and believed it never could be. I cannot and will not ask our troops to fight on endlessly in another in another country’s civil war, taking casualties, suffering life-shattering injuries, leaving families broken by grief and loss. This is not in our national security interest. It is not what the American people want. It is not what our troops who have sacrificed so much over the past two decades deserve. I made a commitment to the American people.

When I ran for president, I said I’d bring America’s military involvement in Afghanistan to an end. While it’s been hard and messy, and yes, far from perfect, I’ve honored that commitment. More importantly, I made a commitment to the brave men and women who served this nation that I wasn’t going to ask them to continue to risk their lives in a military accident that should’ve have ended up long ago. Our leaders did that in Vietnam when I got here as a young man. I will not do it in Afghanistan. I know my decision will be criticized, but I would rather take all that criticism than pass this decision onto another president of the United States, yet another one, a fifth one, because it’s the right one. It’s the right decision for our people, the right one for our brave service members who have risked their lives, serving our nation. And it’s the right one for America. Thank you. May God protect our troops, our diplomats, and all the brave Americans serving in harm’s way.