The Secretary of State said he would not apologize for ending the war in Afghanistan

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he would not apologize for ending the war in Afghanistan, which left 13 Americans dead and the Taliban in charge, during an interview with the New York Times before the Biden administration left.

“I’m not sure that the election opened up any one or a set of foreign policy issues. Most elections don’t. But to put that aside: Americans don’t want us to fight. They don’t. We went 20 years where we had hundreds of thousands of Americans sent to Iraq and Afghanistan in Iraq. As president, you ended the longest war in our history, in Afghanistan,” he said, responding to a question about the election.

The New York Times spoke to Blinken before he left the White House and said that Americans were skeptical of Biden’s foreign policy early because of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which left more than a dozen. American service members he died and it led to the Taliban regaining control. The interviewer asked how the “failure” in Afghanistan damaged America’s credibility.

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“First of all, I’m not apologizing for ending America’s longest war. This, I think, is a sign of the president’s success. The fact that we won’t have another generation of Americans fighting and dying in Afghanistan, that’s a significant success in itself,” Blinken replied.

The Times pushed back, noting that the Taliban had made it harder for women in the country.

The commentator said, “By all means, the way this was done and the situation in which Afghanistan was left was not what the United States wanted.”

“There’s never going to be an easy way out of 20 years of war. I think the question was what were we going to do when we moved forward with withdrawal. We also had to learn the lessons of Afghanistan itself,” said Blinken.

The Biden administration has been plagued by controversy after the controversial withdrawal. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan reportedly even agreed to resign over the decision, according to David Ignatius of The Washington Post.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan speaks during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, Monday, Nov. 13, 2023. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

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It was reported that Sullivan also had concerns about going out, but he ended up saying that it would be a challenge no matter what they did.

“You can’t end a war like Afghanistan, where you’ve built up dependency and disease, without the end being complex and challenging,” Sullivan told a Post reporter. “The choice was: Go, and it wouldn’t be easy, or stay forever.”

He added that “the departure from Kabul is freed [United States] to deal with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in ways that would not have happened had we stayed.”

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Ignatius reported that the withdrawal from Afghanistan “violated the discipline” of the Biden administration’s national security team, and caused a rift between Sullivan and Blinken.