Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an interview with The New York Times ahead of the Biden administration leaving office that he would make no apologies for ending the Taliban-led war in Afghanistan that left 13 Americans dead.
“I’m not at all sure that this election raised one or even several foreign policy issues. Most elections don’t. But putting that aside: Americans don’t want us to have conflict. They don’t. We’ve had 20 years of sending hundreds of thousands of Americans to Iraq and Afghanistan, and when President Biden was Vice President, he ended our longest war in Iraq. We finished our history, Afghanistan,” he said in response to a question about the election.
The New York Times spoke with Blinken ahead of Biden’s departure from the White House and said Americans were early skeptical of Biden’s foreign policy due to his chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. American soldier With his death, the Taliban regained control. The interviewer asked how the “failure” in Afghanistan had damaged America’s credibility.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken appears before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan on Capitol Hill, December 11, 2024. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Biden White House accepts responsibility for ‘chaos’ in Afghanistan and says it is ‘vigilant’ to terrorist threats.
“First, I make no apology for ending America’s longest war. In my view, this is a signal achievement for the president. The fact that there will not be another generation of Americans fighting and dying in Afghanistan is an important achievement at home and abroad. “It is itself.” Blinken responded.
The Times pushed back, pointing out that the Taliban had made life much harder for women in the country.
“By every possible means, the way this was done and the state Afghanistan was left in could not be what the United States wanted,” the interviewer said.
“There was never going to be an easy way to extricate ourselves from 20 years of war. The question was what we would do moving forward from the withdrawal. We also had to learn lessons from Afghanistan itself,” Blinken said. added:
The Biden administration faced backlash after the chaotic withdrawal. According to David Ignatius of the Washington Post, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan reportedly even offered to resign over the decision.
White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan speaks at the White House daily briefing on November 13, 2023. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
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Sullivan also reportedly expressed concerns about leaving, but ultimately said whatever they did would have been difficult.
“You can’t end a war like Afghanistan, with its build-up of dependencies and pathologies, without the end being complex and challenging,” Sullivan told a Post columnist. “The choice was to leave. It wouldn’t be easy, or I would stay forever.”
“Leaving Kabul allows the United States to deal with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in a way that would not have been possible if we had stayed,” he added.
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Ignatius reported that the Afghanistan withdrawal “shattered the initial goodwill” of the Biden administration’s national security team and created conflict between Sullivan and Blinken.
