Biden doubles down on Afghan withdrawal – but he is dancing a fine line
The president’s address to the nation was just that – a speech carefully scripted for domestic consumption.
Never mind that around the world there was an eagerness to understand the wisdom of his decision.
With an all-American backdrop – the stars and stripes filling the space behind him – Joe Biden made a compelling case for why America needed to leave Afghanistan.
“We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on September 11th, 2001, and make sure al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again.
“We did that… Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralised democracy.”
The core of his argument was that staying in Afghanistan would have been futile. He conceded that despite trillions of dollars of military equipment and training, as well as blood and sweat, the Afghan military were unable to stand alone.
“There is no chance that one year, one more year, five more years, or 20 more years of US military boots on the ground would’ve made any difference,” he said.
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In full: Biden speech
He was speaking to an American public about an issue which, according to polling, does resonate: America’s forever wars.
“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? How many more lives, American lives, is it worth? How many endless rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery?”
Yet the fact is that at the point when Mr Biden decided to pull the plug, there were only 2,500 US soldiers in Afghanistan. They were not in an active combat role. They were not coming home in coffins. Afghanistan was, as one former US ambassador to Afghanistan put it to me, “not a red button issue”.
In fact, it is more of a red button issue now given the manner in which the US pulled out.
On this, the president offered little. Despite the images which continue to emerge from Afghanistan, including the tragic pictures of people appearing to fall from a plane as it pulled up from a crowded airstrip, he did not attempt to explain, defend or acknowledge the way in which the United States executed the pull out.
He said: “The scenes we’re seeing in Afghanistan, they’re gut-wrenching, particularly for our veterans, our diplomats, humanitarian workers, for anyone who has spent time on the ground working to support the Afghan people.
“For those who have lost loved ones in Afghanistan and for Americans who have fought and served in the country, serve our country in Afghanistan, this is deeply, deeply personal. It is for me as well.”
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Kabul airport chaos as people cling to plane
He danced a fine line for the home audience, claiming in one breath that this was the right decision – the only decision – but then arguing that he was forced to follow through on a bad deal which Donald Trump struck with the Taliban.
“I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Under his agreement, US forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, just a little over three months after I took office.
“US forces had already drawn down during the Trump administration from roughly 15,500 American forces to 2,500 troops in country, and the Taliban was at its strongest militarily since 2001.
“The choice I had to make, as your president, was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season.”
He knows that the decision was on him. “I am president of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me,” he said. And he expressed regret for how it’s unfolded: “I am deeply saddened by the facts we now face.”
He knows it has caused unease and upset among allies who wonder now about what the value of US commitment is or indeed wonder about the wisdom of American decisions and the quality of its intelligence.
He knows too that America’s foes will be sporting more than just a wry smile. But, he stood by the decision.
“I do not regret my decision to end America’s warfighting in Afghanistan and maintain a laser-focus on our counterterrorism missions there and in other parts of the world.”
And so it was a doubling down of his decision. He chose not to appear contrite about the chaos.
Most strikingly, this did not feel at all like a message for the people of Afghanistan. He talked frequently about “commitments”, but they were commitments to the American people.
The time has come, he seems to have concluded, to end American commitments to Afghanistan, however hard that may be.
US
Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney apologises to Donald Trump over anti-tariff advert featuring Ronald Reagan
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has apologised to Donald Trump over an anti-tariff advert featuring a clip of Ronald Reagan.
Speaking at the Asia-Pacific summit in South Korea, he also said he had reviewed the commercial and told Ontario Premier Doug Ford not to air it.
“I did apologise to the president,” Mr Carney said on Saturday, confirming earlier comments made by the US president on Friday.
“I told [Doug] Ford I did not want to go forward with the ad,” he added.
The private conversation with Mr Trump happened at a dinner hosted by South Korea’s president on Wednesday.
The commercial, commissioned by Mr Ford, included a quote from Republican former president Ronald Reagan saying that tariffs cause trade wars and economic disaster.
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TV advert deepens trade rift between Trump and Canada
Mr Trump said the advert was misleading and, in response, announced that he was increasing tariffs on goods from Canada and halting trade talks with Canada.
In a post on Truth Social, he wrote: “Because of their serious misrepresentation of the facts, and hostile act, I am increasing the Tariff on Canada by 10% over and above what they are paying now.”
It prompted the Ontario premier to pull the ad.
On Friday, the US president expressed his irritation at the advert but also told reporters he had accepted Mr Carney’s apology.
“I like him [Carney] a lot but what they did was wrong,” he said.
“He apologised for what they did with the commercial because it was a false commercial.”
But, critically, he added that the US and Canada will not restart trade talks.
Mr Ford has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration’s tariffs and trade policies, which are hurting Ontario’s carmakers and steel industry.
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The ad by the Ontario government has a voiceover of Ronald Reagan criticising tariffs on foreign goods while saying they cause job losses and trade wars.
The video uses five complete sentences from a five-minute weekly address recorded in 1987, but edited together out of order.
The ad does not mention that the former US president was explaining that tariffs imposed on Japan by his administration should be seen as a sadly unavoidable exception to his basic belief in free trade as the key to prosperity.
Meanwhile, Mr Carney said his talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday were a turning point in relations after years of tensions.
He also met Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on the sidelines of the summit.
US
Donald Trump announces dramatic drop in US refugee intake, with most of them white South Africans
The US is drastically cutting the number of refugees it will allow into the country to 7,500, and giving priority to white South Africans.
The new figure, announced on Thursday in a memo in the Federal Registry, the official journal of the US administration, is a dramatic reduction from last year’s 125,000, set by former president Joe Biden.
No reason was given for the decrease, but the note said the admission of the 7,500 refugees during the 2026 fiscal year was “justified by humanitarian concerns or is otherwise in the national interest”.
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The notice posted to the register’s website said the 7,500 admissions would “primarily” be allocated to Afrikaner South Africans and “other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands”.
It is half the 15,000 total set for 2021 during Donald Trump’s first term in office at the height of the COVID pandemic, which reports said was the previous lowest refugee admissions cap.
Refugee rights groups were quick to condemn the proposal, with International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) president Sharif Aly, saying that by “privileging Afrikaners while continuing to ban thousands of refugees who have already been vetted and approved, the administration is once again politicising a humanitarian programme”.
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, CEO of Global Refuge, said: “Concentrating the vast majority of admissions on one group undermines the programme’s purpose as well as its credibility.”
Human Rights First president, Uzra Zeya, called it a “new low point” in US foreign policy, which will “further destabilise front-line states that host over two-thirds of the world’s nearly 43 million refugees, undermining US national security in tandem”.
US President Donald Trump showed South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa printed-out articles in the Oval Office. Pic: AP
In May, Mr Trump confronted South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa in the White House, claiming white farmers in his nation were being killed and “persecuted”.
A video purporting to show burial sites for murdered white farmers was played but was later shown to be scenes from a 2020 protest in which the crosses represented farmers killed over multiple years.
The South African government has vehemently denied that Afrikaners and other white South Africans are being persecuted.
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In January, the US president suspended the US Refugee Admissions Programme (USRAP) to, in his words, allow US authorities to prioritise national security and public safety.
During the Oval Office meeting, Mr Ramaphosa said only that he hoped that Trump officials would listen to South Africans about the issue, and later said he believed there is “doubt and disbelief about all this in [Mr Trump’s] head”.
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