The president of the United States, Joe Biden, assured this Tuesday that the “The real decision “regarding Afghanistan was whether to” withdraw or increase “the number of soldiers in the Asian country, after a war that he described as “eternal”.
In a message from the White House, the president estimated that “leaving on August 31 was not because it was an arbitrary end date, it was designed to save lives.” This was expressed the day after the complete withdrawal of the troops after almost twenty years of war.
“I did not want to extend an eternal war,” stressed Biden. For this reason, he warned that there was only one “true decision: to withdraw or increase” the military presence. The United States accelerated its exit and evacuation operation from Afghanistan since August 14, a day before the Taliban took power in Kabul. The first world power had invaded the country in October 2001, a month after the attack on the Twin Towers.
The US exit from Afghanistan left scenes of despair and chaos of Afghans trying to leave the country after the arrival of the Taliban to power and an attack, claimed by the Islamic State (IS) group, in a Kabul airport gate last Thursday that left at least 170 dead, including 13 American soldiers. It was the deadliest attack on US troops in Afghanistan since 2011.
Biden, with a confident and serious tone, defended the withdrawal on Tuesday despite the rain of internal criticism and in the international community for being hasty and without contingency plans. He insisted that “there is no way to end a war” and carry out an evacuation of that magnitude “without the kind of complexities, challenges and threats” that the US has had to face..
Specifically, he described the evacuation as “one of the largest in history.” Biden placed the number of people evacuated at 120,000, although he acknowledged that there are still between “one and two hundred” Americans who want to leave Afghanistan, with whom he promised that Washington will continue to work.
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