In an exclusive interview with ABC News on Wednesday, President Joe Biden opened up about the decision to draw down troops from Afghanistan and the ensuing fall of the country to the Taliban.
The president also committed that U.S. forces will stay in the country until all Americans are out, even if it means staying past the Aug. 31 deadline.
“We’ve got like 10 to 15,000 Americans in the country right now, right?” asked “Good Morning America” anchor George Stephanopoulos. “And are you committed to making sure that the troops stay until every American who wants to be out is out?”
“Yes,” Biden replied, before noting that his focus is on completing the mission by the Aug. 31 deadline.
“Americans should understand that we’re gonna try to get it done before Aug. 31,” Biden said.
“If we don’t, we’ll determine at the time who’s left,” Biden continued, adding: “If there’s American citizens left, we’re gonna stay to get them all out.”
“The commitment holds to get everyone out that, in fact, we can get out and everyone who should come out,” Biden said. “And that’s the objective. That’s what we’re doing now. That’s the path we’re on. And I think we’ll get there.”
Officials said Tuesday that 3,200 people so far have been evacuated from Afghanistan, including relocating 2,000 Afghan allies. Officials hope that they can significantly ramp up efforts to evacuate as many as 9,000 people per day.
There is still more than a week until the U.S. withdrawal deadline of Aug. 31, but Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters Wednesday that the military lacks “the capability to go out and collect large numbers of people,” and the U.S. Embassy said it “cannot guarantee safe passage” to Kabul’s airport. The Taliban has vowed “safe passage” to the airport.
Biden said the Aug. 31 goal is realistic if the U.S. can “ramp these numbers up” in the coming days: “If that’s the case, they’ll all be out.”
When pressed by Stephanopoulos on if the exit from America’s longest war could have been handled better, Biden defended the decision to withdraw from the country and said that he did not see a way out without ‘chaos ensuing.’
“I don’t think it could have been handled in a way that, we’re gonna go back in hindsight and look, but the idea that somehow, there’s a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don’t know how that happens,” Biden said. “I don’t know how that happened.”
When Stephanopoulos asked Biden if the situation in Afghanistan was due to “a failure of intelligence, planning, execution or judgment,” Biden said that the decision to withdraw “was a simple choice.”
“When you had the government of Afghanistan, the leader of that government, get in a plane and taking off and going to another country, when you saw the significant collapse of the Afghan troops we had trained, up to 300,000 of them, just leaving their equipment and taking off — that was … that’s what happened,” Biden said. “That’s simply what happened.”
“And so the question was, in the beginning, the threshold question was, do we commit to leave within the timeframe we set, do we extend it to Sept. 1, or do we put significantly more troops in?” the president continued.
Biden noted the deal that his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, struck with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. forces by May 1, which the president has criticized roundly in the last few days.
“I hear people say, well you had 2,500 folks in there and nothing was happening,” Biden said, adding: “The fact was, that the reason that wasn’t happening, was the last president negotiated a year earlier that he’d be out by May 1st and that the return, there’d be no attack on American forces. That’s what was done. That’s why nothing was happening.”
“I had a simple choice,” Biden continued. “If I said, ‘we’re gonna stay,’ then we’d better be prepared to put a whole lot hell of a lot more troops in.”
Biden was asked what he thought when he first saw the images chaos in Afghanistan, including people packed into a C-17 flight, or videos of Afghan civilians falling from planes.
“What I thought was, we have to gain control of this,” Biden said. “We have to move this more quickly. We have to move in a way in which we can take control of that airport. And we did.”
Biden was initially defensive when Stephanopoulos posed the question to him, interjecting “that was four days ago, five days ago,” despite the fact that the images in question were from Monday.
