(WASHINGTON) — In an address to the nation on the crisis in Afghanistan, President Joe Biden conceded that the Taliban takeover of the country unfolded faster than anticipated, but insisted that he remains “squarely behind” his decision to withdraw American troops.

“I will not repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past — the mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely in a conflict that is not in the national interests of the United States, of doubling down on a civil war in a foreign country, of attempting to remake a country through the endless military deployments of U.S. forces,” Biden said.

While Biden said he ultimately bore responsibility for the situation in Afghanistan, declaring “I am president of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me,” he also faulted Afghan forces for the Taliban’s rapid advance.

“We gave them every chance to determine their own future. (What) we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future,” he said.

“There are some very brave and capable Afghan special forces units and soldiers,” the president continued. “But if Afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance to the Taliban now, there is no chance that one more year, five more years or 20 more years of U.S. military boots on the ground would have made any difference.”

Biden also blamed his predecessor for the current situation in Afghanistan, claiming an agreement former President Donald Trump cut with the Taliban while he was in office left him with only two options: End the U.S. military mission or reignite the conflict.

Biden has repeatedly pointed out that he is the fourth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan and adamantly insisted he won’t pass it on to a fifth commander-in-chief.

“So I’m left again to ask of those who argued 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?” Biden said.

Biden also argued that ending the military mission in Afghanistan would free up counterterrorism resources to address broader threats to the homeland posed by jihadist groups throughout Africa and the Middle East.

But concerns within the intelligence community that Afghanistan will revert to an incubator for extremism remains. Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told senators during a briefing that the Pentagon would reassess the threat posed by Al -Qaida now that the Taliban have retaken the country.

As conditions in Afghanistan deteriorate, Republicans are pouncing on the White House, calling the drawdown an embarrassment for the nation.

“What we have seen is an unmitigated disaster — a stain on the reputation of the United States of America,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Monday.

Few Democrats have rushed to publicly defend the Biden administration. In a statement released before the president’s remarks, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, called the images being broadcast out of Afghanistan “devastating” and vowed “to ask tough but necessary questions about why we weren’t better prepared for a worst-case scenario involving such a swift and total collapse of the Afghan government and security forces.”

Biden denied that national security officials were caught off guard, insisting “we were clear-eyed about the risks. We planned for every contingency.”

He also offered little in the ways of an explanation as to why the planned withdrawal had unraveled into a chaotic evacuation effort.

Biden did not take any questions from the reporters gathered in the East Room following his speech, his first public remarks on Afghanistan in nearly a week.

The president was previously scheduled to remain at Camp David until Wednesday, but returned to the White House to deliver the address. He departed again for Camp David shortly after he concluded his remarks.

The White House said Biden had been receiving regular updates from his advisors throughout the weekend and released a photo of Biden being briefed in a video conference Sunday.

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(WASHINGTON) — The Taliban’s return to power has ended America’s two-decade effort to build a democratic society in its mold in Afghanistan. But that effort, despite its billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives, was doomed virtually from the start by a galling failure to understand the country and a willful disregard for local realities on the ground, according to a scathing new report.

The U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, blasted successive U.S. administrations for lacking the “necessary mindset, expertise, and resources to develop and manage the strategy to rebuild Afghanistan,” in its latest report released Tuesday.

The report, prepared before Kabul’s fall, found that while the U.S. achieved some important successes for the Afghan people, those gains would be lost if the Taliban took control.

“The U.S. government struggled to develop a coherent strategy, understand how long the reconstruction mission would take, ensure its projects were sustainable, staff the mission with trained professionals, account for the challenges posed by insecurity, tailor efforts to the Afghan context, and understand the impact of programs,” the report said.

More than 140 pages long, the report details how 20 years and $145 billion of effort were often wasted because projects weren’t tailored to the complex realities on the ground. Essentially, the U.S. government kept trying to force Afghanistan into a box that it didn’t — and couldn’t — fit into, the report found.

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan,” Douglas Lute, who oversaw the war for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama from 2007 to 2013, told SIGAR. “We didn’t know what we were doing.”

“It’s really much worse than you think,” he added. “There (was) a fundamental gap of understanding on the front end, overstated objectives, an overreliance on the military, and a lack of understanding of the resources necessary.”

This is the 11th annual lessons-learned report released by SIGAR, which has 13 years of oversight work now. John Sopko, the special inspector general, has highlighted failures throughout the U.S. war in Afghanistan, from waste and fraud to a lack of transparency.

These failures in reconstruction, in particular, had critical impacts on a local level, according to the report, undermining U.S. efforts to erode support for the Taliban and build faith in the Afghan government.

“In the majority of districts, we never even heard the real problems of the people,” Jabar Naimee, who served as governor of three Afghan provinces, told SIGAR. “We made assumptions, conducted military operations, brought in government staff, and assumed it would lead to security and stability.”

But it did not. The report argued that since the U.S. government did not pay attention to the local context when projects were implemented, they often stoked local conflicts because one interest group was prioritized over another, which allowed insurgents to create alliances.

Staffing failures exacerbated those problems, according to the inspector general’s report. U.S. reconstruction projects were created and funded — and then officials were ordered to find individuals to carry them out — leading to unqualified workers and construction efforts that were often abandoned before completion.

“DOD police advisors watched American TV shows to learn about policing, civil affairs teams were mass-produced via PowerPoint presentations, and every agency experienced annual lobotomies as staff constantly rotated out, leaving successors to start from scratch and make similar mistakes all over again,” the report said.

Those failures at the program-level and below were mirrored by “policymakers’ ignorance of the Afghan context at the highest strategic levels,” according to the report, with the influence of politics always behind the scenes.

“U.S. officials also prioritized their own political preferences for what they wanted reconstruction to look like, rather than what they could realistically achieve,” the report said.

Afghan officials are to blame as well, the report said, especially for corruption. But the vast amount of American money flowing to reconstruction projects would often fuel that problem.

“The ultimate point of failure for our efforts wasn’t an insurgency,” Ryan Crocker, who served as ambassador to Afghanistan, told SIGAR. “It was the weight of endemic corruption.”

Because the U.S. government refused to create a successful peace process, “the Taliban soon rebuilt itself as a powerful insurgency,” according to the report.

That may now doom the Afghan people to a return to darker days.

“There is no doubt, however, that the lives of millions of Afghans have been improved by U.S. government interventions,” the report said, including gains in life expectancy, the mortality of children under five, GDP per capita, and literacy rates. But the report argued that these gains were neither proportional to the massive U.S. investment nor sustainable with the U.S. military now leaving.

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