Biden said there was no way the US could pull out of Afghanistan without ‘chaos’

The American President, Joe Biden, on Wednesday defended that there was no way to withdraw from Afghanistan without causing “chaos”, and admitted that the Taliban was not cooperating to allow the United States to withdraw its Afghan collaborators from the country ..

“The idea that there could have been a way out without causing chaos, I don’t know how it could have come about,” Biden said in an interview with ABC News, which provided a snippet of it before Stream it in its entirety on Wednesday.

Biden said US troops could stay in Afghanistan beyond the Aug. 31 departure deadline if necessary to evacuate all Americans from the country.

When asked if the troops would stay until all the Americans were evacuated, Biden replied, “Yes.”

“We will try to do it before August 31st“, He indicated, before adding:” If there are still American citizens, we will stay to remove them all. “

The Democrat said the Taliban was helping to evacuate US citizens and foreigners from Kabul, but He admitted that US forces were facing “difficulties” in getting Afghan allies out of the country.

The insurgents who now control Afghanistan “are cooperating, allowing American citizens to leave, American personnel to leave, embassy personnel to leave … but eWe have more difficulty with those who helped us when we were there», Declared the president.

On Wednesday, the US State Department denounced that the Taliban “are blocking the roads to prevent Afghans who want to leave from reaching the airport” in Kabul, amid evacuation efforts organized by American troops.

This This is a violation of the deal the United States had made with the insurgent group., by which he promised to allow safe passage to the airport for civilians who wanted to leave.

During the interview with ABC, Biden said no when asked if the recall could have been handled better., despite the fact that he had to send 7,000 troops to the Central Asian country to protect the evacuation process, nearly three times the 2,500 who were in the country in May, before the start of the military withdrawal .

The president was on the defensive when interviewer George Stephanopoulos reminded him of photos of “hundreds of people crammed into a C-17 (plane)” and “Afghans falling” from another American plane as he was taking off from Kabul.

“It was four days ago, five days ago!Biden exclaimed in exasperation, despite the fact that the two cases the reporter referred to happened on Monday, two days before the interview.

When asked what he thought upon seeing these images, Biden replied: “I thought we needed to control this. We have to go faster. We have to act in such a way that we can control this airport. And we did”.

As to whether there were intelligence or execution failures, Biden again blamed the Afghan government, recalling that President Ashraf Ghani “got on a plane and left” the country, and that he There has been a “significant collapse” of the Afghan government. the United States had trained.

“There are people who say: well, (in April) there were 2,500 troops there and nothing was happening, but the reason nothing was happening is that the previous president (Donald Trump) negotiated a year before he would leave the countries before May 1 and that there would be no attacks on American troops», He underlined.

He insisted that if his government had violated this agreement and postponed the withdrawal, it should have been “prepared to send many, many more troops” into the country and expose them to Taliban attacks, and he refused to take that risk. .

In contrast, the US government admitted Wednesday that there were “at least several deaths” when several Afghans tried to board an American plane during the chaos unleashed between Sunday and Monday at Kabul airport.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby admitted that, based on visual evidence and a statement released by the U.S. Air Force on Tuesday, there were at least several deaths in these events.

Kirby was referring to viral videos on the internet and broadcast on televisions around the world, showing hundreds of civilians trying to board American planes at the airport.

One of these recordings showed a device already in the air from which a person was apparently falling. The spokesperson did not want to anticipate the conclusion of the Air Force investigation or offer figures on the deaths.

“I will simply convey our deepest condolences once again to the loved ones and families of the dead,” Kirby said.

(With information from AFP and EFE)

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