Biden blames Talibans success last-minute evacuation from Afghanistan on failures of Ghanis government

US President Joe Biden came back to the White House from the presidential retreat at Camp David to address the US withdrawal from Afghanistan that has resulted in total collapse of the government in Kabul and a Taliban takeover.

Biden opened up with a fiery defense of the US’ invasion of Afghanistan, celebrating the destruction of Al-Qaeda and the killing of Osama Bin Laden, though the latter took place in Pakistan almost ten years after the invasion.

However, the president then condemned the “nation building” that the US had engaged in for much of the two-decade war, and defended his decision to pull out now.

Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to be nation-building… creating a unified, centralized democracy,” but “preventing a terrorist attack on [the] American homeland

Biden blamed his predecessor Donald Trump for making a deal with the Taliban to withdraw the US troops from Afghanistan by May 1 â€" which his administration only partially repudiated, to extend the deadline through August 31. He also blamed the US-backed Afghan government for failing to fight against the Taliban, even after Washington spent tens of billions of dollars creating an army bigger than that of some NATO allies.

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“We gave them every tool they could need,” Biden said. “We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them, was the will to fight for that future.”

Without that, no amount of length of US presence wouldn’t have made any difference, he argued. “It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own forces would not.”

Biden departed for Camp David on Thursday and was scheduled to stay there until Wednesday. White House press secretary Jen Psaki took the week off, according to out-of-office responses to email inquiries by media outlets over the weekend. With almost all of Afghanistan under Taliban control now, and the evacuation from Kabul airport interrupted by crowds of Afghans desperate to climb on board the departing planes, the administration’s plans appear to have changed.

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