America’s almost twenty-year military presence will conclude on August 31st, President Joe Biden has said that the US has not been to “national construct” the war-torn country.
Strongly defending his determination to pull US troops out of America’s long-standing war, Biden argued that the country’s own pressing issues could not be resolved by any prolonged American military presence in Afghanistan.
Biden said the US has achieved its aims in the country in a major policy address on Afghanistan on Thursday following a meeting with his national security team, and this was the right moment for withdrawing American soldiers.
“Our military mission in Afghanistan will conclude on August 31st. The drawdown is proceeding in a secure and orderly way, prioritising the safety of our troops as they depart,” Biden told reporters at the White House.
“We did not go to Afghanistan to nation-build. And it’s the right and the responsibility of the Afghan people alone to decide their future and how they want to run their country,” he said, just days after the US pulled out of the massive Bagram airbase that became the operations center of the war.
US forces have fought in Afghanistan for nearly 20 years, following the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.
He explained that after spending USD 1 trillion over 20 years and seeing 2,448 American service personnel die and 20,722 more wounded, the US cannot remain tethered to a policy set two decades ago when Afghanistan-based al-Qaida terrorists attacked the country.
The president emphasised that he will not send “another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation of achieving a different outcome.”
On Tuesday, the US military announced the withdrawal process was more than 90 percent complete.
Biden also dismissed reports that the Taliban would take over the country soon after the withdrawal of the American troops from Afghanistan.
“The Afghan government and leadership have to come together. They clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place. The question is will they generate the kind of cohesion to do it,” Biden said.
