EFE.- US President Joe Biden defended on Wednesday that there was no way to withdraw from Afghanistan without unleashing “chaos”, and acknowledged that the Taliban are not cooperating to allow the United States to remove its Afghan collaborators from the country.
“The idea that there could have been some way out without causing chaos, I don’t know how that could have happened,” Biden said in an interview with the network. ABC News, which advanced an extract before issuing it in full this Wednesday.
The president also admitted that his government is having a hard time getting Afghans who helped US troops and personnel during the war out of the country, despite the fact that the Taliban had promised to allow the safe passage of civilians to the airport.
The Taliban “are cooperating, allowing American citizens to leave (the country), American personnel and embassy personnel. But we are having more difficulties in the case of those (Afghans) who helped us when we were there ”at war, Biden said.
This 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 US troops.
This is a violation of the agreement that the United States had reached with the insurgent group, by which it promised to allow the safe passage to the airport of civilians who wanted to leave.
During the interview with ABC, Biden answered no to the question of whether the withdrawal could have been managed better, despite the fact that he has had to send 7,000 soldiers to the Central Asian country to protect the evacuation process, almost triple the 2,500 that They were in the country in May, before the military withdrawal began.
The president was defensive when the interviewer, George Stephanopoulos, reminded him of photos of “hundreds of people crammed into a C-17 (plane)” and “Afghans falling” from another US aircraft as it took off from Kabul.
“That was four days ago, five days ago!” Exclaimed Biden in exasperation, despite the fact that both cases the journalist referred to occurred on Monday, two days before the interview.
Asked what he thought when he saw those images, Biden replied, “I thought we had to control this. We have to move faster. We have to move in such a way that we can control that airport. And we did it ”.
As for whether there were intelligence or execution failures, Biden once again blamed the Afghan government, recalling that President Ashraf Ghani “got on a plane and left” the country, and that there was a “significant collapse” of the Afghan government. Afghan forces that the United States had trained.
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“There are people who say: well, (in April) there were 2,500 troops there and nothing was happening, but the reason why nothing happened is that the previous president (Donald Trump) negotiated a year before that he would leave the country for the 1 May and that there would be no attacks on US troops, “he stressed.
He insisted that if his government had breached that agreement and postponed the withdrawal, it would have had to be “prepared to send many, many more soldiers” to the country and expose them to attacks by the Taliban, and he refused to take that risk.
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