US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an interview before exiting the White House that he would not make any apologies for having ending the war in Afghanistan.

Speaking to The New York Times, ahead of the Biden administration’s exit, he said: “Americans don’t want us in conflict. They don’t want us in war. We went through 20 years where we had hundreds of thousands of Americans deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. 

“People were tired of that, understandably. Well, when President Biden was vice president, he presided over the end of our engagement in Iraq. As president, he ended the longest war in our history, Afghanistan,” he said.

The NYT journalist asked how the Afghanistan “failure” damaged America’s credibility.

“First, I make no apologies for ending America’s longest war. This, I think, is a signal achievement of the president’s. The fact that we will not have another generation of Americans fighting and dying in Afghanistan, that’s an important achievement in and of itself,” Blinken responded. 

He did however state that “in every possible way, the manner in which this (the withdrawal) was done and the state in which Afghanistan has been left could not have been what the United States desired.”

“There was never going to be an easy way to extricate ourselves from 20 years of war. I think the question was what we were going to do moving forward from the withdrawal. We also had to learn lessons from Afghanistan itself,” Blinken added.

The Biden administration was hit with pushback after the chaotic withdrawal. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan even reportedly offered to resign over the decision, according to The Washington Post’s David Ignatius.

Sullivan also reportedly had concerns about the exit, but ultimately said it would have been challenging no matter what they did.

“You cannot end a war like Afghanistan, where you’ve built up dependencies and pathologies, without the end being complex and challenging,” Sullivan told the Post columnist. “The choice was: Leave, and it would not be easy, or stay forever.”

Sullivan added that “leaving Kabul freed the [United States] to deal with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in ways that might have been impossible if we had stayed.”