Less than two months after I elected to office, I was sworn in, all of a sudden, I have a May 1 deadline. We're agreeing to leave if you agree not to attack us between now and the time we leave on May the 1st." And here's the deal I wanna make with you, Taliban. Look, George, the reason why it's been stable for a year is because the last president said, "We're leaving.
No one said that to me that I can recall. If I had said, "We're gonna stay," then we'd better prepare to put a whole hell of a lot more troops in -īIDEN: No. But the idea if I had said - I had a simple choice. You know, there wasn't any war."īut guess what? The fact was that the reason it wasn't happening is the last president negotiated a year earlier that he'd be out by May 1st and that- in return, there'd be no attack on American forces. Or do we put significantly more troops in? I hear people say, "Well, you had 2,500 folks in there and nothin' was happening. So the question was in the beginning the- the threshold question was, do we commit to leave within the timeframe we've set? We extended it to September 1st. When you had the government of Afghanistan, the leader of that government get in a plane and taking off and going to another country, when you saw the significant collapse of the ta- of the- Afghan troops we had trained - up to 300,000 of them just leaving their equipment and taking off, that was - you know, I'm not- this - that - that's what happened. When the- when the Taliban - let me back - put it another way. STEPHANOPOULOS: So when you look at what's happened over the last week, was it a failure of intelligence, planning, execution or judgment?īIDEN: Look, I don't think it was a fa- look, it was a simple choice, George. But no one said it was gonna take over then when it was bein' asked. BIDEN: Well, by the end of the year, I said that's that was - that was a real possibility.