Biden: Americans Shouldn't Die In A War That Afghans Aren't Willing To Fight

The NPR Politics Podcast

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4.5 • 24.9K Ratings

🗓️ 16 August 2021

⏱️ 15 minutes

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Summary

In a speech at the White House Monday, President Biden forcefully defended his decision to withdrawal from Afghanistan — rebuking the Afghan government for being unwilling to fight the Taliban and emphasizing that spending more time and money in the country would not, in his view, have changed the outcome.

The president devoted very little of the speech to criticism he has faced over how the withdrawal was conducted. He took no questions from reporters.

It remains to be seen how many of tens of thousands of Afghans who aided the American war effort will be successfully evacuated.

This episode: congressional correspondent Kelsey Snell, Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman, White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, it's the NPR politics podcast. I'm Kelsey Snal, I cover Congress.
0:08.1	I'm Franco Ordonia as I cover the White House.
0:10.4	And I'm Mara Lias, National Political Correspondent.
0:13.8	It's 4.49 pm on Monday, August 16th. Afghanistan is now under Taliban control. The country's
0:21.3	president, Ashraf Ghani, has fled and the U.S. Embassy has been evacuated. President
0:26.4	Biden returned to Washington from Camp David today to address the nation.
0:30.5	The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.
0:37.2	So what's happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan
0:45.6	military collapsed sometime without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of
0:53.5	the past week reinforced that any U.S. military involvement of Afghanistan now was the right
1:00.4	decision. American troops cannot and should not be fighting an war and dying in a war
1:09.6	that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.
1:13.4	We have NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman here to help with context. Tom, thanks so
1:17.4	much for being here.
1:18.4	Good to be with you.
1:19.4	You know, before we get into the domestic politics of this, can we start with what this
1:23.4	means for the people of Afghanistan?
1:26.0	Well, it means a completely different country, especially for women and girls. They'll have
1:30.2	to cover up. The Taliban say girls can continue to go to school very few doubt that. It's
1:35.9	going to be a completely different country. And the future is bleak for many, many people
1:41.5	in that country.
1:43.1	Just to give us an idea, who is still in the country as far as Americans and Afghans who
	...

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