Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he would make no excuses for ending the war in Afghanistanthat left thirteen Americans dead and the Taliban in charge, during an interview with The New York Times ahead of the Biden administration’s departure.
“I’m not at all sure that the election focused on one or even a set of foreign policy issues. This is not the case in most elections. But apart from that, the Americans don’t want us to get into conflict. We deployed hundreds of thousands of Americans to Iraq and Afghanistan for 20 years. People were understandably fed up with that, when President Biden was vice president, he presided over the end of our involvement in Iraq. As president, he ended the longest war in our history, Afghanistan,” he said in response to a question about the elections.
The New York Times spoke to Blinken ahead of his departure from the White House and said Americans were skeptical of Biden’s foreign policy early on because of the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, which left more than a dozen people behind. US service members death and led to the Taliban regaining control. The interviewer asked how Afghanistan’s “failure” damaged America’s credibility.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken will appear before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan on Wednesday, December 11, 2024, at the Capitol in Washington. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
“First, I make no apologies for ending America’s longest war. This, I think, is a major achievement for the president. The fact that we won’t have another generation of Americans fighting and dying in Afghanistan is a major achievement in and of itself,” Blinken responded.
The Times pushed back, noting that the Taliban have made things much harder for women in the country.
The interviewer said, “The way this happened and the state that Afghanistan was left in could not, by any means, have been what the United States wanted.”
“There was never going to be an easy way to extricate ourselves from twenty years of war. I think the question was what we were going to do after the withdrawal. We also had to learn lessons from Afghanistan itself,” Blinken added.
The Biden administration faced a setback after the chaotic withdrawal. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan is even reported to have said so offered to resign about 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 also reportedly had concerns about the exit, but ultimately said it would have been a challenge no matter what they did.
“You can’t end a war like Afghanistan, where you’ve built up dependencies and pathologies, without the ending being complex and challenging,” Sullivan told the Post columnist. “The choice was: leave, and it wouldn’t be easy, or stay forever.”
He added that “leaving Kabul gave the (United States) the freedom to deal with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a way that would have been impossible if we had stayed.”
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Ignatius reported that the withdrawal from Afghanistan “broke the early compassion” of the Biden administration’s national security team and caused a rift between Sullivan and Blinken.
