On Friday, President Biden made a statement claiming al Qaeda was gone from Afghanistan. However, in an interview with Fox, Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted that this is incorrect.
While at the White House, Biden questioned why Americans would still be interested in remaining in Afghanistan “with al Qaeda gone”.
A United Nations report highlighted that 15 out of the 34 Afghan provinces have a presence from the terrorist group.
In his interview, Blinken acknowledged that Biden’s claim was seemingly untrue and offered clarification on the statement.
As we all know, we went to Afghanistan 20 years ago with one mission and one purpose in mind: and that was to deal with the folks who attacked us on 9/11, to bring bin Laden to justice, which we did a decade ago, and to diminish the capacity of al Qaeda to do the same thing again, to attack us from Afghanistan and that, to the president’s point, has been successful.
Antony Blinken
When asked a second time by host Chris Wallace if al Qaeda was gone from Afghanistan, Blinken said the organizations capability of carrying out another attack like 9/11 was “vastly, vastly diminished”.
Wallace had to ask a third time before Blinken admitted it was not gone.
Are there al Qaeda members and remnants in Afghanistan? Yes. But what the president was referring to was its capacity to do what it did on 9/11 and that capacity has been very successfully diminished.
Blinken
When asked about the opinions of our allies in other countries on the crisis, Blinken said he had heard “across the board, deep appreciation and thanks from allies and partners for everything that we’ve done to bring our allies and partners out of harm’s way”.
Wallace brought up a memo that was sent to Blinken in July from staffers at the U.S. embassy in Afghanistan. The memo stated that the Taliban takeover was going quicker than expected and asked that the evacuation be sped up. Blinken partially blamed the lack of speed on the Trump Administration. he also mentioned that despite the memo, they did not think the takeover would happen so swiftly.