Biden administration continues to defend decision to withdraw troops

As the one-year anniversary of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan approaches, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said this week that keeping American troops in Afghanistan “could not be justified” and no amount of American military presence led to victory after 20 years.

“It had to come to an end,” he said at the Aspen Security Forum held in Colorado this past week.

Sullivan also said that President Joe Biden is convinced he made the right call to end America’s involvement in the war but added it had been “horrible, painful” for him to watch the images at Kabul International Airport in August last year.

According to Politico, the conference ended with three takeaways: The Biden administration still defends the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, admits the process to bring Afghans who served alongside U.. troops in that war stateside is “slow,” and Trump’s Pentagon chief called the former president a threat to democracy.

Mark Esper, former president Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, called his last boss “a threat to democracy” who is guilty of “dereliction of duty” following the January 6 insurrection, Politico reported.

What Trump did “is not in keeping with the best traditions of our country, let alone the Oval Office,” he said.