US President Biden Justifies Troop Withdrawal From Afghanistan Despite Growing Criticism

United States President Joe Biden is standing by the decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan after hold a 20-year military presence. He bats that it was the right decision to end what is branded the “forever war.”

Biden went on to say that the decision was something that he and military advisers came to. Also, he believed that had US troops gone beyond the set Aug. 31 deadline, it would have meant exposing them to heightened security risk.

“Let me be clear: leaving August 31 is not due to an arbitrary deadline. It was designed to save American lives,” Biden stated.

Many criticized the decision of Biden believing that they had a moral and ethical obligation to their Afghan partners. This is despite the fact that the US president pointed out that they were able to airlift 120,000 people out of Afghanistan, one of the biggest airlifts in the country.

“We completed one of the biggest airlifts in history … That number is more than double what most experts thought were possible. No nation, no nation has ever done anything like it in all history,” Biden explained.

However, along with that comes tarnished images that went down in the past weeks before the Aug. 31 deadline. To some, the scenes were very damaging for Biden. This is despite a poll from Pew Research showing that 54% of respondents still favor Biden’s decision to pull out US troops from Afghanistan.

Despite the pullout, however, Biden maintains that the US military would continue to operate in the air in Afghanistan that would act against terrorist attacks.

“We will maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries,” the US president said. “We just don’t need to fight a ground war to do it. We have what’s called over-the-horizon capabilities, which means we can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground.”