US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has just spoken on CNN, where he was asked by host Jake Tapper: “How did President Biden get this so wrong?”
The network then played a clip from Biden, speaking last month, calling a total Taliban victory “extremely unlikely”.
“First, let’s put this context,” said Mr Blinken: “As we’ve discussed before, we were in Afghanistan for one over-riding purpose – to deal with the folks that attacked us on 9/11.
He says that the US achieved its goals of bringing Osama bin Laden to justice and diminishing the capabilities of the Al Qaeda terror group.
“On the terms that we went to Afghanistan in the first place, we’ve succeeded in achieving our objectives,” says Blinken.
“The idea that the status quo could have been maintained by keeping our forces there, I think is simply wrong,” he continues.
He says that Taliban attacks on the US would have ramped up after 1 May, and “the offensive… to retake these provincial capitals would have commenced” regardless of the US military presence.
He stressed: “We’re going to keep in place in the region the capacity to see if [there is] any emergence of a terrorist threat, and to be able to deal with it.”
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