Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he would make no apologies for ending the war In AfghanistanWhich left 13 Americans dead and the Taliban took responsibility, during an interview with the New York Times before the Biden administration left.
“I'm not at all sure that the election focused on any one issue or even a set of foreign policy issues. Most elections don't do that. But leaving that aside: The Americans don't want us to get into a conflict. They don't want that.” We've had 20 years where we had hundreds of thousands of Americans deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. People are tired of it, and that's understandable. Well, when President Biden was Vice President, he oversaw the end of our engagement in Iraq as president, he ended the longest war in our history, history and Afghanistan,” he said in response to a question about the election.
The New York Times spoke with Blinken before he left the White House, and said that Americans were skeptical of Biden's foreign policy early on because of the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, which left more than a dozen soldiers behind. US service members He was killed and led to the Taliban regaining control. The interviewer wondered how the “failure” in Afghanistan damaged America's credibility.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken appears before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, December 11, 2024. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
“First, I make no apology for ending America's longest war. I think that's a huge accomplishment for the president. The fact that we won't have another generation of Americans fighting and dying in Afghanistan is an important accomplishment in Afghanistan and in Afghanistan,” Blinken responded.
The Times rejected this, noting that the Taliban had made things more difficult for women in the country.
“In every possible way, the way it was done and the state Afghanistan became could not have been what the United States wanted,” the interviewer said.
Blinken added, “There was no easy way to extricate ourselves from 20 years of war. I think the question is what are we going to do moving forward after the withdrawal. We also had to learn lessons from Afghanistan itself.”
The Biden administration was criticized after the chaotic withdrawal. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan even weighed in I offered to resign on the decision, according to David Ignatius of The Washington Post.
White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan speaks during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, Monday, November 13, 2023. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
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Sullivan reportedly had concerns about coming out, but ultimately said it would have been a challenge no matter what they did.
“You cannot end a war like Afghanistan, where dependencies and diseases have accumulated, without the ending being complicated and difficult,” Sullivan told the Washington Post. “The choice was: leave, and it won't be easy, or stay forever.”
He added, “Getting out of Kabul freed (the United States) to deal with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in ways that might have been impossible had we stayed.”
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Ignatius stated that the withdrawal from Afghanistan “broke the early courtesy” of the Biden administration’s national security team, and sparked a dispute between Sullivan and Blinken.
