President Biden: Does Not See How It Was Possible To Retreat From Afghanistan Without Stirring Chaos | Israel today

Breaking the silence:

US President Joe Biden was interviewed tonight (Wednesday to Thursday) for the first time since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the ongoing rescue operation, saying he saw no other way to carry out the withdrawal from the country without "provoking chaos."

EXCLUSIVE: Pressed on whether the US's exit from Afghanistan could have been handled better, Pres.

Biden tells @GStephanopoulos, "The idea that somehow, there's a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing — I do not know how that happens."

https://t.co/mH1AyWI5lb pic.twitter.com/giTMWCuub5

- ABC News (@ABC) August 19, 2021

In an exclusive interview given by Biden on the American ABC network, the US president continued to defend the withdrawal from Afghanistan, despite the fall of the country to the Taliban, and said that with regard to possible mistakes made by the US in the withdrawal he "did not think it could be addressed Go back and see - but the very idea that somehow there is a way to retreat without causing chaos.

I do not know how this happens.

I do not know how it happened. "

Later, Biden was asked if he thought any action that would include a withdrawal would also create chaos in the country, to which he replied that "yes. One of the things we did not know was what the Taliban would do in terms of trying to prevent people from leaving the country. What will they do now? "We are allowing American citizens to leave the country, American military and service personnel to leave, embassy personnel to leave, etc. But we have more difficulty bringing those who helped us while we were there."

As is well known, Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan provoked riots and mass escape attempts in the country that led to difficult scenes.

Hundreds of Afghans and even more arrived at Kabul airport in order to board a plane and flee the country.

Some of them managed to get on planes of different countries and manage to escape from the country that had just fallen to the Taliban, other parts failed and some people even lost their lives in an attempt to escape by self-tying to the wheels of the plane.

These images created astonishment in the media and led to much criticism against Biden within the United States, both from the Republican Party and the Democratic Party of which Biden is a member.

When asked by the US President for the issue, Biden first emphasized that the events took place "five days ago" and then added that "what I thought was that we should gain control of this event.

We need to act faster.

We need to act in such a way that we gain control of the airport.

And so we did. "

At the same time, during the interview Biden was asked whether the American withdrawal operation and the manner in which it was carried out indicated a failure of intelligence, planning, execution or judgment. The US president replied: “It was a choice. When there was still the Afghan government, the leader of that government got on a plane and took off for another country, seeing the significant collapse of the Afghan soldiers we trained, up to 300,000 soldiers, who just left their equipment and left ... that was what happened. That's just what happened. "

Biden went on to say that he had merely implemented the decision led by his predecessor in office, stressing that the 2,500 troops still in the country, there even though the original date for the withdrawal was May 1. "The question that was at the beginning, the threshold question," Biden said, "is do we commit to leaving the country within the time limit we have set, do we extend the period to September 1, or do we now put a significant amount of troops in? I had a simple choice, if I would say 'we are going to stay', so we should be prepared to bring in a lot more soldiers into the country. "