US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday defended President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan as Taliban fighters began entering the capital, Kabul.
In a series of interviews on Sunday talk shows, Blinken said the US succeeded in its mission of bringing those responsible for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to justice and argued that remaining in the country was not sustainable.
“Remaining in Afghanistan for another one, five, 10 years was not in the national interest,” Blinken said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
While many have started comparing Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan to America’s flight from Saigon during the Vietnam War in 1975, Blinken pushed back against that comparison.
“This is manifestly not Saigon,” the Secretary of State said on ABC’s “This Week”, adding that Biden had a “tough decision” to make after the Trump administration established a deadline of May 1 to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.
“If the president had decided to stay, all gloves would have been off. We would have been back at war with the Taliban,” Blinken said, adding the US would likely have had to send tens of thousands of additional troops to the country to fight.
Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, left the country for Uzbekistan on Sunday, The Guardian reported, citing Al Jazeera.
On Monday morning at 10:00 o'clock local time, the UN Security Council is planning to hold an emergency meeting in New York to discuss the situation.
As of Sunday evening, shooting is being reported in several parts of Kabul, according to eyewitness accounts and the country’s Interior Ministry, in contrast to earlier reports which stressed the relatively peaceful nature of the incursion. A local hospital reports dozens of wounded.