President Joe Biden could not hide his frustration with reporters peppering him with questions about the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan ahead of the July Fourth holiday weekend.
“I want to talk about happy things, man,” Biden said Friday after delivering a jobs update from the White House.
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When pressed for a third time about Afghanistan after U.S. forces left Bagram Airfield, the largest military base in Afghanistan, Biden insisted he would not answer any more questions on the end of the country’s longest war.
“I’m concerned you guys are asking me questions that I will answer next week,” he said. “It’s the holiday weekend. I’m going to celebrate it. There’s great things happening.”
He went on to describe the questions as “negative” before correcting himself and calling them “legitimate.”
Biden also snapped at a reporter who asked him whether he was confident a closely divided Congress will pass his “plans” as the House and Senate consider his infrastructure proposals.
“Come on, guys!” Biden said. “Have you ever been confident about anything with guarantee? Who wants to put money on anything that Congress is going to do?”
Before he grew irritable, Biden said not to expect all military personnel to be pulled out of Afghanistan “in the next few days.”
“There’ll still be some forces left, but it’s a rational drawdown with our allies,” he said of the Sept. `11 deadline.
But Biden admitted he was worried about the internal issues Afghanistan faces as its government and the Taliban negotiate the transition after the international coalition’s 20-year presence.
“I think they have the capacity to be able to sustain the government,” he said after meeting last week with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. “We can be value-added, but the Afghans are going to have to be able to do it themselves with the air force they have.”
The U.S. operation in Afghanistan, launched in response to al Qaeda’s attack on Sept. 11, 2001, had been headquartered at Bagram Air Base.
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Roughly 650 service members will remain in the country past the fall, most of whom will provide the U.S. Embassy with diplomatic security.
