US President Joe Biden, after delivering an address with a defensive tone on the country’s involvement in the Afghanistan war, said that nation-building was never supposed to be the mission of the United States in Afghanistan.

In a tweet posted minutes after the address from the White House concluded, Biden wrote, “We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on September 11, 2001—and make sure al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again. We did that—a decade ago. Our mission was never supposed to be nation building.”

The 46th President of the United States made similar statements in his address and said that the creation of a democratic country was not the mission of the country. Instead, the national interst of the United States in Afghanistan revolved around preventing attacks on American soil.

He said, “Afghanistan was never supposed to be nation-building or create a unified, centralised democracy. Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been preventing terrorist attack on American homeland”, news agency ANI reported.

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Biden’s statements on Monday afternoon presented a defensive stance on the decisions his administration had taken in the last few months in relevance to Afghanistan. Biden said he squarely stood behind his decision of withdrawing United States troops from Afghanistan and putting an end to a war that had lasted for nearly two decades.

Similar statements were made by United States National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan through the White House Twitter handle. He said, “President Biden was not prepared to usher in a third decade of war and put U.S. troops in harm’s way, fighting and dying, to try to hold Afghanistan together when its own armed forces would not fight to hold it together.”