Edited by: TJVNews.com

Faced with tough questions about leaving Afghanistan, including Americans left behind, President Joe Biden addressed the nation Tuesday about the way forward after 20 years of U.S. war.

The Independent of the UK reported that the president said that “90 per cent of Americans in Afghanistan who wanted to leave were able to leave” while adding that for those who remained beyond the 31 August withdrawal deadline, “there is no deadline.”

“We remain committed to get them out, if they want to come out,” he said.

After imposing the August 31st deadline for full US withdrawal, Biden said that “the assumption” among his administration and military officials was that thousands of Afghan security forces would provide a strong defense from the Taliban’s seizure in transition.

“That assumption, that the Afghan government would be able to hold on … turned out not to be accurate,” he said, as was reported by the Independent.

He “instructed the military to prepare for every eventuality.”

“Leaving on 31 August is not an arbitrary deadline,” he said. “It was designed to save American lives.”

The Independent reported that Biden slammed Trump’s agreement with the Taliban to withdraw by May 1st without any cooperative governance agreements along with agreements to release thousands of Taliban prisoners, which Biden suggests allowed the Taliban to be in its strongest position in more than a decade.

Biden also said the administration was faced with reneging on withdrawal and committing more troops to the 20-year war, or “between leaving, and escalating.”

“I was not going to extend this forever war, and I was not extending a forever exit,” he said.

Biden has called mass evacuations of Afghan and Americans an “extraordinary success” following the implosion of Afghan forces and Taliban dominance.

“The extraordinary success of this mission was due to the incredible skill, bravery, and selfless courage of the United States military and our diplomats and intelligence professionals,” he said.

He called it “not a mission of war, but in a mission of mercy.”

The AP reported that Biden is under heavy criticism, particularly from Republicans, for his handling of the final evacuation, which successfully airlifted more than 120,000 people from Kabul airport but left more than 100 Americans behind.

The White House signaled Biden would look to begin turning the corner on Afghanistan with his address.

“He will make clear that as president, he will approach our foreign policy through the prism of what is in our national interests, including how best to continue to keep the American people safe,” press secretary Jen Psaki said in statement.

The last Air Force transport plane departed Kabul one minute before midnight Monday, raising questions about why Biden didn’t continue the airlift for at least another day. He had set Tuesday as a deadline for ending the evacuation and pulling out remaining troops after the Taliban took over the country.

In a written statement Monday, Biden said military commanders unanimously favored ending the airlift instead of extending it. He said he asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken to coordinate with international partners to hold the Taliban to their promise of safe passage for Americans and others who want to leave in the days ahead, according to the AP report.

Thousands of troops spent a harrowing two weeks protecting the airlift of Afghans, Americans and others seeking to escape a country once again ruled by Taliban militants.

Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, said he believed remaining Americans who want to leave will still be able to, as was reported by AP. He called the situation heartbreaking but said that even if U.S. forces had stayed another 10 days, “we wouldn’t have gotten everybody out that we wanted to get out, and there still would have been people who would have been disappointed with that. It’s a tough situation.”

AP reported that Blinken put the number of Americans still in Afghanistan at under 200, “likely closer to 100,” and said the State Department would keep working to get them out. He said the U.S. diplomatic presence would shift to Doha, Qatar.

Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, said Tuesday of the effort to get remaining Americans out: “It’s just that it has shifted from a military mission to a diplomatic mission.” On ABC’s “Good Morning America,” he cited “considerable leverage” over the Taliban to complete that effort.

The closing hours of the evacuation were marked by extraordinary drama. American troops faced the daunting task of getting final evacuees onto planes while also getting themselves and some of their equipment out, even as they monitored repeated threats — and at least two actual attacks — by the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate. A suicide bombing on Aug. 26 killed 13 American service members and some 169 Afghans. More died in various incidents during the airport evacuation.

The final pullout fulfilled Biden’s pledge to end what he called a “forever war” that began in response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and rural Pennsylvania. His decision, announced in April, reflected a national weariness of the Afghanistan conflict, as was reported by the AP.

In Biden’s view the war could have ended 10 years ago with the U.S. killing of Osama bin Laden, whose al-Qaida extremist network planned and executed the 9/11 plot from an Afghanistan sanctuary. Al-Qaida has been vastly diminished, preventing it thus far from again attacking the United States.

Congressional committees, whose interest in the war waned over the years, are expected to hold public hearings on what went wrong in the final months of the U.S. withdrawal. Why, for example, did the administration not begin earlier the evacuation of American citizens as well as Afghans who had helped the U.S. war effort?

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., on Tuesday described the Biden administration’s handling of the evacuation as “probably the biggest failure in American government on a military stage in my lifetime” and promised that Republicans would press the White House for answers on what went wrong.

“We can never make this mistake again,” McCarthy said.

It was not supposed to end this way. AP reported that the administration’s plan, after declaring its intention to withdraw all combat troops, was to keep the U.S. Embassy in Kabul open, protected by a force of about 650 U.S. troops, including a contingent that would secure the airport along with partner countries. Washington planned to give the now-defunct Afghan government billions more to prop up its army.

Biden now faces doubts about his plan to prevent al-Qaeda from regenerating in Afghanistan and of suppressing threats posed by other extremist groups such as the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate. The Taliban are enemies of the Islamic State group but retain links to al-Qaida.

The speed with which the Taliban captured Kabul on Aug. 15 caught the Biden administration by surprise. It forced the U.S. to empty its embassy and frantically accelerate an evacuation effort that featured an extraordinary airlift executed mainly by the U.S. Air Force, with American ground forces protecting the airfield. AP reported that the airlift began in such chaos that a number of Afghans died on the airfield, including at least one who attempted to cling to a C-17 transport plane as it sped down the runway.

The Taliban reveled in their victory after the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, reiterating their pledge Tuesday to bring peace and security to the country after decades of war. Their anxious citizens, meanwhile, are waiting to see what the new order looks like, as was reported by the AP.

Having humbled the world’s most powerful military, the Taliban now face the challenge of governing a nation of 38 million people that relies heavily on international aid, and imposing some form of Islamic rule on a population that is far more educated and cosmopolitan than it was when the group last governed Afghanistan in the late 1990s, as was reported by the AP.

Thousands who had worked with the U.S. and its allies, as well as up to 200 Americans, remained in the country after the massive airlift ended with the last U.S. soldiers flying out of Kabul international airport just before midnight Monday.

Hours later, turbaned Taliban leaders flanked by fighters from the group’s elite Badri unit toured the abandoned airport and posed for photos, as per the AP report.

“Afghanistan is finally free,” Hekmatullah Wasiq, a top Taliban official, told The Associated Press on the tarmac. “Everything is peaceful. Everything is safe.”

He urged people to return to work and reiterated the Taliban’s offer of amnesty to all Afghans who had fought against the group over the last 20 years. “People have to be patient,” he said. “Slowly we will get everything back to normal. It will take time.”

A long-running economic crisis has worsened since the Taliban’s rapid takeover of the country in mid-August, with people crowding banks to maximize their daily withdrawal limit of about $200. Civil servants haven’t been paid in months and the local currency is losing value. Most of Afghanistan’s foreign reserves are held abroad and currently frozen, according to the AP report.

“We keep coming to work but we are not getting paid,” said Abdul Maqsood, a traffic police officer on duty near the airport. He said he hasn’t received his salary in four months.

A major drought threatens the food supply, and thousands who fled during the Taliban’s lightning advance remain in squalid camps.

“Afghanistan is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe,” said Ramiz Alakbarov, the local U.N. humanitarian coordinator. He said $1.3 billion is needed for aid efforts, only 39% of which has been received.

The AP reported that the challenges the Taliban face in reviving the economy could give Western nations leverage as they push the group to fulfill a pledge to allow free travel, form an inclusive government and guarantee women’s rights. The Taliban say they want to have good relations with other countries, including the United States.

The AP reported that there are few signs of the draconian restrictions the Taliban imposed last time they were in power. Schools have reopened to boys and girls, though Taliban officials have said they will study separately. Women are out on the streets wearing Islamic headscarves — as they always have — rather than the all-encompassing burqa the Taliban required in the past.

“I am not afraid of the Taliban,” said Masooda, a fifth-grader, as she headed to school on Tuesday.

It was recently reported that a group of Western feminists worked around the clock for several weeks to secure the release of one particular Afghani feminist and as a result of their efforts, 30 women were able to successfully flee the rule of the Taliban.

In a recent article titled, “Team of Radical Feminists Rescues Thirty Afghan Women,” Middle East expert, veteran feminist activist, and CUNY professor emeriti, Dr. Phyllis Chesler wrote of her experiences in securing the release of these women.

She writes: “These Afghan feminists are heroic, fearless, and are fighting for universal feminist values. Some are still in hiding in Afghanistan, others are at the airport in Kabul, some are in the air. The lucky ones are in overcrowded temporary camps in the Middle East, or dispersed throughout Europe. They rely on us because they have no one else left.”

When the Taliban last ruled the country, from 1996 to 2001, they banned television, music and even photography, but there’s no sign of that yet. TV stations are still operating normally and the Taliban fighters themselves can be seen taking selfies around Kabul.

 

On Tuesday, the sound of dance music trickled out of an upscale wedding hall in Kabul, where a celebration was in full swing inside, as was reported by the AP.

Shadab Azimi, the 26-year-old manager, said at least seven wedding parties had been held since the Taliban takeover, with festivities moved to daytime because of security concerns. He said the Taliban have yet to announce any restrictions on music, but that wedding singers have canceled out of caution, forcing him to use tapes.

Azimi said a Taliban patrol stops by a couple times a day, but only to ask if he needs help with security. Unlike the now-disbanded police of the toppled, Western-backed government, the Taliban don’t ask for bribes, he said.

“Former officials, including police officers, were always asking us for money and forcing us to host their friends for lunches and dinners,” he said. “This is one of the positive points of the Taliban.”

AP reported that Abdul Waseeq, 25, runs a women’s clothing shop in downtown Kabul selling Western-style jeans and jackets. The Taliban have left him alone, but his clientele seems to have vanished and he’s concerned about the banking crisis.

“Most of our customers who were buying these kinds of clothes are gone, evacuated from Kabul,” he said.

(Sources: AP & The UK Independent. Additional reporting by Fern Sidman)