Biden Defends Afghanistan Withdrawal Decision

WHITE HOUSE - U.S. President Joe Biden is defending his decision to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan despite the quickly unfolding calamity there, vowing not to pass on the problem to a fifth U.S. president.  

"American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves," the president said in a 20-minute nationally televised speech Monday afternoon from the White House East Room.   Biden's speech – his first on-camera remarks in six days – came after he briefly interrupted his summer holiday, returning from Camp David, in the state of Maryland. Immediately after the address, taking no questions from reporters, he returned to the wooded presidential retreat.   During his remarks, Biden said the U.S. mission in Afghanistan "was never supposed to be a nation-building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy. Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what has always been, preventing a terrorist attack on (the) American homeland."