Nationwide Safety Adviser Jake Sullivan stated on Sunday that President Biden made the fitting strategic name to withdraw from Afghanistan three years in the past and that historical past displays properly on that call.
“The strategic call President Biden made, looking back three years, history has judged well and will continue to judge well,” Sullivan stated in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
He continued, “From the point of view that, if we were still in Afghanistan today, Americans would be fighting and dying; Russia would have more leverage over us; we would be less able to respond to the major strategic challenges we face.”
Sullivan additionally pointed to the current instance of the New Yr’s Day assault in New Orleans, noting that “although the investigation continues,” the FBI has not seen “any connection between Afghanistan and the attacker in New Orleans.”
“Now, the FBI will continue to look for foreign connections. Maybe we’ll find one, but what we’ve seen is proof of what President Biden said, which is that the terrorist threat has gotten more diffuse and more metastasized elsewhere, including homegrown extremists here in the United States who have committed terrorist attacks,” Sullivan stated. “Not just under President Biden, but under President Trump in his first term.”
“And that is part of why we had to move our focus from a hot war in Afghanistan to a larger counterterrorism effort across the world,” he added.
Sullivan declined to reply to reviews that he had supplied to resign after the Afghanistan withdrawal, saying he wouldn’t reveal particulars of his private conversations with the president.
“What I can tell you,” he added, “is that the United States of America is definitively better off that we are not entering our 25th year of Americans fighting and dying in Afghanistan.”
