Biden: ‘It is time to end America’s longest war’
WASHINGTON – Calling for the end of a two-decade war that saw 775,000 American troops serve and 2,300 killed, President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced all U.S. forces will withdraw from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, the 20year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that triggered the conflict.
“It is time to end America’s longest war,” Biden said in a speech from the White House Treaty Room, where former President George W. Bush announced the first airstrikes in Afghanistan in 2001. “It is time for American troops to come home.”
Biden said the U.S. has accomplished its main objective of ensuring Afghanistan won’t remain a base from which terrorists can attack the homeland again. He said the U.S. must shift its focus to target terrorism threats that “have become more dispersed and metastasized around the globe.”
“We delivered justice to Bin Laden a decade ago, and we’ve stayed in Afghanistan a decade since then,” Biden said, referring to the 2011 killing of Osama Bin Laden, the onetime leader of the al-Qaida terrorist network. “Since then, our reasons for remaining in Afghanistan are becoming increasingly unclear.”
Yet the withdrawal came with concerns from some of Biden’s allies and the U.S. intelligence community that a military departure could thrust Afghanistan further into chaos.
An intelligence report Tuesday gave a bleak outlook for peace in Afghanistan if the U.S. withdraws, predicting the Taliban is “likely to make gains on the battlefield, and the Afghan government will struggle to hold the Taliban at bay if the coalition withdraws support.”
The war in Afghanistan – which sought to establish democratic governance, defeat al-Qaida and push the Taliban out of power – has cost the U.S. more than $2 trillion and taken the lives of more than 38,000 Afghan civilians.
Biden’s timeline would extend a prior agreement negotiated by former President Donald Trump to withdraw all troops by May 1. Instead, the more than 3,000 troops still in Afghanistan would begin coming home on May 1. At the height of
The US exit from Afghanistan will be made “responsibly, deliberately and safely,” Biden said.
the war in 2011, 98,000 U.S. troops were deployed in Afghanistan before a steady decline over the past decade.
“I am now the fourth American president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan – two Republicans, two Democrats,” Biden said. “I will not pass this responsibility to a fifth.”
Biden sought to counter criticism from Republicans and some Democrats who say U.S. objectives – including recent civil rights gains by Afghan women under the Taliban regime – could be lost if the U.S. exits too soon.
Biden said the U.S. “will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit,” adding it will be made “responsibly, deliberately and safely.”
Biden, who campaigned on a promise to end America’s “forever wars,” had faced increasing pressure on whether to stick to Trump’s May 1 deadline. He thanked American soldiers who fought in Afghanistan for their “bravery and backbone” and followed up his speech with a trip to Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery. There, he paid respects to service members who died in the war in Afghanistan.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the withdrawal is a “a disaster in the making” and “so irresponsible, it makes the Biden Administration policies at the border look sound.” Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., whose father Dick Cheney was vice president when the war began, called the Sept. 11 deadline “a huge propaganda victory for the Taliban, for al-Qaida.”