Joe Biden has suggested there was no way for the US to withdraw from Afghanistan “without chaos ensuing”, and said US troops may stay past a 31 August deadline to evacuate Americans there.
As critics in the US and abroad questioned his handling of the withdrawal, the president said in his first on-camera interview since the Taliban took Kabul that troops would stay in the country to get American citizens out.
“If there’s American citizens left, we’re going to stay until we get them all out,” Biden told ABC News, implying that he would listen to US lawmakers who had pressed him to extend the 31 August deadline he had set for a final pullout.
At the same time, Biden defended his administration’s handling of the withdrawal. Asked if he thought it could have gone better, Biden said: “No.”
“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,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
The sentiment contradicts what Biden had said weeks back, when he insisted that the “likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely”.
Biden told ABC the Taliban were cooperating in helping get Americans out of the country, but admitted “we’re having some more difficulty” in evacuating US-aligned Afghan citizens.
He said: “They’re cooperating, letting American citizens get out, American personnel get out, embassies get out, et cetera, but they’re having … we’re having some more difficulty having those who helped us when we were in there.”
The speed with which Taliban forces retook Afghanistan, as US and other foreign forces withdrew, has led to chaotic scenes at the airport with diplomats, foreign citizens and Afghans trying to flee. They are being impeded by crowds and Taliban checkpoints.
The US said it has evacuated 3,200 people from Afghanistan but thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Afghans who want to leave the country remain.
Biden appeared dismissive of images that emerged on Monday of packed US military planes taking off from Kabul airport as people clung to their sides. At least two people apparently fell to their deaths from the undercarriage soon after takeoff.
Stephanopoulos said: “We’ve all seen the pictures. We’ve seen those hundreds of people packed in a C-17. We’ve seen Afghans falling … ”
Biden interrupted and said: “That was four days ago, five days ago!”
The president was asked what he thought when he first saw those pictures.
Biden replied: “What I thought was: we have to gain control of this. 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.”
The president was also asked whether what happened in Afghanistan over the past week was a “failure of intelligence, planning, execution or judgment”.
Biden said: “Look, it was a simple choice, George. 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, you know, I’m not, that’s what happened. That’s simply what happened.”
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