President Joe Biden is not backing down from his decision to exit Afghanistan. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON: With the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan all but complete, US President Joe Biden took the stage and offered a full-throated defense of his decision to remove American troops after almost 20 years of conflict.

Anyone expecting a mea culpa for how quickly and thoroughly the Taliban was able to take control, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel offered earlier in the day, would have been disappointed by Biden, who placed the blame entirely on the Afghan political and military leadership.

“Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending US military involvement Afghanistan now was the right decision,” Biden said in an address from the White House.

“American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war, and dying in a war, that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”

If the Afghan military “is unable to mount any real resistance of the Taliban now, there is no chance that one year, one more year, five more years, or 20 more years, that US military boots in the ground have made any difference,” Biden said. “Here’s what I believe to my core: It is wrong to order American troops to step up and Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not.”

From a domestic political calculus, the argument that Americans shouldn’t fight when the Afghan’s won’t may be a strong one. The belief that the US should get out of the so-called “forever war” is one of the few that crosses over divided Democrats and Republicans; a Chicago Council survey conducted in July found that 70 percent of Americans backed exiting Afghanistan. And Biden expressly stated in his speech that his first concern has to be American lives, not the situation on the ground in Kabul or elsewhere.

“So I’m left again to ask of those who argue that we should stay: How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghan troops will not? How many more lives, American lives, is it worth? How many endless rows of headstones with Arlington National Cemetery?” Biden asked rhetorically. “I’m clear on my answer: I will not repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past, the mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely in a conflict is not in the national interests of the United States.”

Richard Fontaine, CEO of the Center for a New American Security think tank, said Biden’s speech was largely a restatement of the president’s previous comments. But he noted Biden’s focus on the Afghan will to fight misses out on a key aspect: that the Afghan military has for years shown that willingness to defend Afghanistan despite “probably unsustainable” levels of casualties.

“Their will to fight ultimately in part depended on the will of the United Sates to support them, with air power, with some troops on the ground and things like that. When the United States took away that support, then the will to fight did go away,” Fontaine said. “The will to fight is not an independent variable. It’s dependent on other things, and it turns out it was dependent on the American will to stay in the country.”

Polls taken in the last several days, as dramatic photos and videos of Afghans trying to flee the country have emerged, show public support for how Biden has handled the withdrawal is dropping.

Noticeably, Biden focused on the larger question of staying in Afghanistan, as opposed to the thornier question of whether his administration did a good enough job preparing for a collapse many experts felt were inevitable, and why the Biden team seemed so behind the ball on providing assistance for Afghan civilians who were instrumental in aiding American forces for two decades.

Of the roughly 18 minute speech, Biden nodded to this criticism only briefly, and once again put the blame on the former government: “I know there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghans civilians sooner. Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier, still hopeful for their country. And part of it because the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid ‘triggering,’ as they said, a crisis of confidence.”

While the speed with which the Taliban took over clearly caught many by surprise, questions about logistics were present almost immediately after Biden’s May announcement that he would have all US forces out of Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Expect those questions to continue, both from Republicans who smell political blood on this issue – despite having a party platform that called for the withdrawal from Afghanistan – and from members of Biden’s own party, such as Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the chair of the Senate Intel Committee. Warner this morning said the administration must answer “tough but necessary questions about why we weren’t better prepared” for the government to collapse.

After Biden’s speech, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said he believed up to 5,000 evacuees could be carried out a day between now and Aug. 31 — the date by which Biden had ordered the US military to be out of the country. But with the Taliban reportedly controlling the pathway to the airport, how many Afghans with American ties can actually make it to those planes is unknown.

To underscore the situation, an Afghan reporter at the Pentagon began to ask a question of Kirby before breaking down in tears.

“I’m very upset because Afghan woman didn’t expect that overnight all the Taliban come. They took off my flag. This is my flag, and they put their flag,” she said, her voice rising. “We ask, where is my president, former President Ghani? … We don’t have any presidents, we don’t have anything. Afghan people, they don’t know what to do.”