It’s going to be a long tough week for United President; Joe Biden as he faces growing calls to address the nation after Taliban forces completed their conquest of the Afghan capital on Sunday, overthrowing the country’s US-backed leadership and sending thousands of people out of the country.
US leaders were at the presidential retreat at Camp David on Sunday, where they did not make any public comments and statements from their officials were minimal and the war in Afghanistan had ended after nearly two decades.
Adding to the pressure is the fact that Mr. Joe Biden himself predicted a few weeks ago that the Taliban could not be compared to the North Vietnamese Communist Army and therefore posed little threat to the Afghan government; His secretary of state, Antony Blinken, fought with various news anchors over the evacuation of Saigon on Sunday.
Mr Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, explained on Monday that the president “stands” on his decision to remove troops from the country, the pace of which many have blamed for the country’s rapid descent into chaos.
The president is now in discussions with advisers to make a national address about the fall of Afghanistan and is facing calls to address his comments just a month ago, predicting stability in the county, as many People ask how America and the Biden administration could have gotten by like this. Bad read about the situation on the ground.
Robert Gibbs, a former Obama White House press secretary, addressed reports that Mr Biden would speak to Americans soon, saying “hopefully it will be very soon.”
“It is imperative for the president to speak to the nation and the world. He must re-state the reasoning behind his decisions, how he sees the future of the region and another to plan attacks for al-Qaeda. What needs to be done to prevent safe havens,” Mr Gibbs said.
Rep. Jackie Spear, the president’s aide in Congress, said: “This is a crisis of untold proportions”, and called the Taliban’s advance an “intelligence failure” on the part of the US.
The urgency of the issue was only underscored by the Saigon-like images and videos that hit Twitter on Monday morning, showing desperate Afghan citizens attempting to cling to the outside of a departing US military plane as It was trying to take off from the airport in Kabul.
Pentagon officials told Granthshala that US forces remain in control of the airport as recently as late Sunday, and take over air traffic control operations with the support of Afghan civilians to ensure that commercial flights and US military craft can continue to depart Had taken.
During his interview on Monday, Mr Sullivan echoed a claim made by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Sunday during a call with members of Congress, which suggested that Afghan fighters “in fighting the country’s Taliban victory”. desire” was lacking.
Sunday’s fall in Kabul came just weeks after Mr. Joe Biden vehemently promised that the situation was not “distantly comparable” to the fall of Saigon, even as the situation accelerated into the airport by Chinook helicopters in the Americans. Will stop to run away. .
“The Taliban is not … the North Vietnamese military. They are not – they are not even remotely comparable in terms of capability,” Mr. Biden said on July 8. “There will never be a situation where you see people being lifted from the roof of an embassy in the United States — from Afghanistan in the United States. It’s not comparable at all.”
White House officials on Sunday did not respond to requests for comment on the president’s comments from July.
