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National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said Sunday that President Biden made the right strategic call to withdraw from Afghanistan three years ago and that history reflects that decision well.
“The strategic call that President Biden made, looking back three years, history has judged well and will continue to judge well,” Sullivan said 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 great strategic challenges we face.” .
Sullivan also pointed to the recent example of the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans, noting that “while the investigation is ongoing,” the FBI has seen “no connection between Afghanistan and the ‘attacking New Orleans’.
“Now, the FBI will continue to look for foreign connections. We may find one, but what we’ve seen is proof of what President Biden said, which is that the terrorist threat has become more diffuse and further metastasis elsewhere, including homegrown extremists here in the United States who have committed terrorist attacks,” Sullivan said. “Not just under President Biden, but under President Trump in his first term.”
“And that’s part of the reason we had to shift our focus from a hot war in Afghanistan to a larger counterterrorism effort around the world,” he added.
Sullivan declined to respond to reports that he had offered to resign after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, saying he would not reveal details of his personal conversations with the president.
“What I can tell you,” he added, “is that the United States of America is definitely better off not going into our 25th year of Americans fighting and dying in Afghanistan.”
