Antony Blinken

Evacuating 124,000 was a miraculous task.

The entire international community has a stake in ensuring the Taliban live up to their public commitments and obligations.

I`m responsible for the decisions that I make. We made the right decision in ending America`s longest war.

We were right to end the war. We were right not to send a third generation of Americans to Afghanistan to fight and die there.

To all members, I appreciate the opportunity to be with all of you today to discuss our policy on Afghanistan.

Somewhere along the way, with the best of intentions, we also sought to remake the country.

We are committed to the agreement which has been signed in Doha between the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and the United States.

The United States will continue to deepen counterterrorism cooperation with India and coordinate closely on developments in Afghanistan.

Over the last 20 years at different times, Congress has been misled.

We wanted to complete the mission in Afghanistan when we had a chance.

We will be relentless in helping them depart Afghanistan, if and when they choose to do so.

We needed to withdraw. The options were extremely limited.

India has longstanding concerns about regional terrorism and instability in South Asia, which have grown more acute in light of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.

We would do everything within our means to have their backs, and so would many other countries around the world.

We want to make sure that that does not happen, because if people lose faith and confidence in it...

It certainly runs counter to those goals, whenever there are civilian casualties, whenever there are unintended injuries or deaths.

But as an institution, after 20 years of investment by the United States, by the international community, hundreds of billions of dollars, equipment, support, training, as an institution, it collapsed in 11 days.

That required some coordination with them to get people through and to the airport.

Absolutely. We stand by our commitments to both countries.

We strongly support that. Those need to be updated to reflect present realities, not reality as it was in 2001 or 2002.

The Taliban made abundantly clear in many public statements, private statements to us, to others around the world that it was going to hold us to the deadline that the previous administration negotiated in terms of withdrawing the…

The reality is that the government and Afghan national security forces collapsed.

We will stand by our commitments. We will stand by our commitments to Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act.

I would call it very, very significant.

We inherited a deadline. We did not inherit a plan.