WASHINGTON, Aug 17, 2021 (BSS/AFP) - President Joe Biden broke days of

silence Monday on the chaotic American pullout from Afghanistan, doubling
down on his decision as he fired scorching criticism at the country's former
Western-backed leadership for failing to resist the Taliban.

  "I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I've learned the hard
way that there was never a good time to withdraw US forces," he said in a
televised address from the White House.

  As images of chaos and desperation beamed in from Kabul, where American
soldiers were trying to mount an evacuation from the airport while Taliban
fighters flooded the city, Biden said: "The buck stops with me."

  Brushing off criticism that the evacuation is a debacle, he said the
priority is to stop a war that had expanded far beyond its initially modest
goals of punishing the Taliban for links to Al-Qaeda after 9/11.

  "Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-
building," he said, vowing that despite the departure of US troops anti-
terrorism operations would continue.

  Biden said "thousands" of US citizens and Afghans who had worked with
American forces are to be evacuated over the coming days. He threatened a
"devastating" military response if the Taliban launch attacks in the
meantime.

  Underlining his show of confidence, Biden left the White House soon after
the speech to return to his weekend retreat at Camp David. He had flown into
Washington just hours earlier to give the speech after coming under pressure
to address the nation.

  - Blaming the Afghans -

  While Biden said he took responsibility for the fate of the US mission, he
lashed out at the former Afghan government and military commanders who were
put in place, organized and supported by Washington over the last 20 years.

  Instead of standing up to the advancing Taliban -- a highly experienced
guerrilla force but more lightly armed than the US-supplied Afghan army --
the government fled.

  "We gave them every chance to determine their own future. We could not
provide them the will to fight for that future," Biden said.

  Partly acknowledging the surprising suddenness of the final Taliban
assault, Biden said "this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated."

  But rather than dwell on the shocking scenes of Afghans mobbing the airport
or respond to criticism that the White House was unprepared, Biden hammered
home his wider message that ending the war is what matters.

  "Our true strategic competitors, China and Russia, would love nothing more
than the United States to continue to funnel billions of dollars in resources
and attention into stabilizing Afghanistan indefinitely," he said.

  Biden said he was "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 Afghans -- Afghanistan's civil war -- when Afghan
troops will not?"

  - Political damage -

  Biden had been on a political roll until this last week.

  Defying those who said Washington had become too dysfunctional for
bipartisan dealmaking, Biden was celebrating the passage by the evenly
divided Senate of his $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. His Democrats were
starting to work on a second, mind-bogglingly ambitious $3.5 trillion bill.

  And it was only a few weeks ago that Biden was congratulating Americans for
their Covid vaccination rates -- a seeming victory over the coronavirus that
the emerging Delta variant has now put in peril.

  Like the pandemic, Afghanistan was a crisis that Biden inherited.

  The US public has long lost interest in the fighting there and Trump tapped
into powerful isolationist sentiment with a drive to extricate the country
from "stupid" post-9/11 wars.

  Unlike on most other matters, Biden agreed with his Republican predecessor.

  In fact, Biden's pullout is based almost entirely on a plan set in motion
by Trump himself, who ordered negotiations with the Taliban and, if
reelected, had been teeing up an even earlier exit.

  But Biden now owns the fallout and what he had hoped would be a positive,
if somber, occasion has become a political nightmare, with critics raising
the Kabul mess as a sign of failed leadership.

  "Contrary to his claims, our choice was not between a hasty and ill-
prepared retreat or staying forever," Senator Mitt Romney said.

  Another Republican senator, Ben Sasse, was harsher, calling Biden's speech
"shameful" and the evacuation a show of "weakness and betrayal."