Shockingly, he said that members of the Taliban—the same folks beheading people across Afghanistan—”are moving back the perimeter, stopping vehicles, and searching people,” suggesting that that was a good thing.
But don’t worry, because “they’re acting in their interest… no one trusts them. We’re just counting on their self-interest to continue to generate their activities. It’s in their self-interest that we leave when we said and that we get as many people out as we can.”
“It’s not a matter of trust, it’s a matter of mutual self-interest,” he again insisted. “There’s no evidence thus far, that I’ve been given… that there has been collusion between the Taliban and ISIS in carrying out what happened today.”
The president said the evacuation is “expected to continue beyond today.”
Asked how he can justify putting more troops in harm’s way, he gave an incoherent answer. “What America says matters. What we say we’re going to do in the context in which we say we’re going to do it, that we do it, unless something exceptional changes.”
“They’re not good guys, the Taliban,” he reiterated. “I’m not suggesting that at all. But they have a keen interest… they’d very much like to see how they can keep the airport open… and maintain what is a portion of the economy that is not robust but fundamentally different than it had been.”
Asked whether it was a mistake to abandon Bagram Air Base, he said that in the “best military judgment” of his commanders, “they concluded, the military, that Bagram was not much value added, that it was much better to focus on Kabul and so I focused on that recommendation.”
“Imagine where we’d be if I had indicated on May the 1st I was not going to renegotiate an evacuation date. We were gonna stay there. I’d have only one alternative: Pour thousands of more troops back into Afghanistan to fight a war that we had already won relative to why the reason we went in the first place,” he explained.
“I have never been of the view that we should be sacrificing American lives to try to establish a Democratic government in Afghanistan,” Biden continued, “a country that has never once in its entire history been a united country, and is made up, and I don’t mean this in a derogatory, made up of different tribes who have never ever ever gotten along with one another.”
Biden ended the briefing at that point and cited other meetings he needed to attend.
But Biden didn’t have to pick a date adjacent to September 11th: “The punchline to Biden claiming his hands were tied is that he already did flout Trump’s May 1 deadline, pushing it to September 11 because he wanted to be able to give a big speech congratulating himself for having Americans out of Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of the attacks. He could have insisted on a New Year’s deadline instead, when the climate would have held off the Taliban. Why didn’t he? At least he mourned the dead. Pelosi spoke earlier today and didn’t bother.”
UPDATE: No, Biden Can’t Blame Trump For The Afghanistan Withdrawal Disaster.
(Updated and bumped.)