‘This is not Saigon’: Blinken defends US evacuations from Kabul

US secretary of state defends Washington’s drawdown of personnel from Afghan capital amid rapid advance by the Taliban.

As the United States withdraws personnel from its embassy in Kabul amid the Taliban’s rapid advance on the Afghan capital, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has rejected comparisons to the US exit from Vietnam decades ago. In a series of US media interviews on Sunday, Blinken again defended President Joe Biden’s decision to pull US troops out of Afghanistan by the end of August, despite mounting criticism that it allowed the Taliban to swiftly take over key cities across the country. “Remember, this is not Saigon,” Blinken told CNN, referring to the fall of Saigon in 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War. “We went to Afghanistan 20 years ago with one mission, and that mission was to deal with the folks who attacked us on 9/11 – and we have succeeded in that mission.”