President Joe Biden addressed Americans on Monday afternoon to express his regret and frustration over the violence and desperation being seen out of Afghanistan. However, Biden made it clear that he does not apologize for drawing down troops and leaving the country.
"I am President of the United States of America. and the buck stops with me. I'm deeply saddened by the facts we now face. But I do not regret my decision to end America's warfighting in Afghanistan," said Biden.
When addressing the comments, MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace, who worked for President George W. Bush when Americans first went into Afghanistan in 2001, said that the country will agree with Biden.
"I'm going to say two things, both hard to say," she prefaced. "But I'll say them anyway because here they are: 95 percent of the American people will agree with everything he just said. Ninety-five percent of the press covering this White House will disagree. And for an American president to finally be completely aligned with such an overwhelming majority of what the American people think about Afghanistan is probably a tremendous relief to the American people."
Former Obama deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes noted that Biden has been against sending more troops into Afghanistan since the "surge" in 2009.
"He had concluded at that point that there were diminishing returns in what we could accomplish militarily in Afghanistan," said Rhodes. "And I think also throughout the Obama years we saw successes in the counterterrorism side of the mission's most notably the removal of Osama bin Laden, but we saw the continued grinding problem of a persistent Taliban threat, of corruption in the Afghan government, and the lack of a formula that could coalesce a stable centralized government. And I think what he's saying, and I think he made a very strong and powerful case for it, is that staying for one year or five years was not going to achieve that goal of building a cohesive nation in which the Taliban no longer posed a threat. And so he wasn't going to spend any more time on it."
He went on to say that this is the Biden he saw during the Obama administration.
"This is someone saying 'I'm going to draw a clear line, this war may not have ended like any of us wanted it to, it may have exposed the overreach in American foreign policy, it may have exposed the ways in which we have consistently misjudged our capacity to engineer events in other countries, but I'm comfortable being the one who takes the heat because I believe it's in our better interests to stop this here,'" Rhodes closed.
Wallace said that Biden is willing to retaliate if the Taliban attacks any Americans as we're leaving but that everything Americans worked towards was essentially ignored by Afghans.
"This White House may not have come to this with a forthright explanation of how quickly the Taliban would take over the country, but this president came to this speech with a very forthright explanation of why that was," Wallace continued. He suggested that President Ashraf Ghani engage in diplomacy. He did not. He suggested that President Ashraf Ghani engage in, you know, the kinds of ways that you build a state that is trusted and responsive to its people. They did not. So, if they were surprised, which is what that sound bite made it sound like they were, he said in July this will look nothing like our, you know, escape basically from Saigon, and when it did this White House was caught flat-footed."
She also said that she would tell Republicans on television arguing to stay in Afghanistan that wasn't even an option not for Biden and certainly not for former President Donald Trump who said his drawdown would happen by May.
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