For the American President, Joe Biden, much criticized since the meteoric takeover of the Taliban in Afghanistan, it was impossible to withdraw the American troops without a form of “chaos” in the country, he declared in an excerpt from interview broadcast this Wednesday by the ABC channel.
At a time when Washington accuses the Taliban of not keeping their promise to leave free access to Kabul airport to all those who want to flee, the American president has also admitted to encounter “more difficulties” in evacuating the Afghans. than Americans. The idea “that in a way there was a way out without chaos ensuing, I do not see how that is possible”, he hammered.
No “failure” for Joe Biden
In this excerpt, the journalist of the American channel George Stephanopoulos evokes the images of hundreds of passengers crammed into an American C-17 plane and those of “Afghans falling” from a plane, in reference to a video appearing to show bodies aired Monday. Joe Biden interrupts him by throwing: “It was four days, five days ago!” “.
“What did you think when you saw these pictures? », The journalist reminds him. “What I thought was ‘we need to take control of this. We have to move faster. We have to move in a way that allows us to take control of this airport.’ And we did it, ”replied Joe Biden. In the same interview, he rejects the word “failure” to qualify the US troop withdrawal operations. “I do not think that it is about a failure …”, begins to answer the American president before stopping.
A factor taken into account for the withdrawal of troops
“To put it another way, when you have the Afghan government, a leader of that government, getting on a plane and taking off, and going to another country, when you see the significant collapse of the Afghan troops that we had trained, 300,000 of them that just drop their gear and go, it’s been, you know … It’s been. This is quite simply what happened, ”he stressed.
Was this “chaos” factor already taken into account in your decision to withdraw the troops, asks the journalist. “Yes”, replies Joe Biden. The operation to evacuate the thousands of American and Afghan civilians, who are thronging around Kabul airport to try to flee the country after the return to power of the Taliban, depends entirely on the goodwill of the insurgents.