Biden seeks to turn debacle in Afghanistan to victory at home

The US pullout from the Pentagon's once mighty Bagram Air Base in the dead of night, while Taliban fighters pour across the country, looks a lot like a military defeat. Back home, President Joe Biden sees a political win.

The US government calls its Afghan exit a "drawdown," not a retreat. And it insists it will continue to support the increasingly vulnerable Afghan government from a distance.

However, the rapid, secretive extraction of all but a handful of the final US troops leaves no doubt about Biden's one true priority: ending 20 years of fruitless warfare against a Taliban insurgency that could not be beaten.

Afghanistan is "a war that the president continues to feel does not have a military solution," press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Tuesday.

Biden originally set a deadline for the withdrawal of September 11 -- the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that first triggered US invasion of Afghanistan.

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