In February 2020, Joe Biden, then a presidential candidate, was interviewed on the US news programme, Face the Nation, on CBS. The host, Margaret Brennan, turned to the subject of Afghanistan, and reminded Biden what he had said in 2010: “I’m not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights. It just won’t work. Not what we’re there for.” She asked him what he meant. “What I meant,” Biden clarified, “was there’s a thousand places we could go to deal with injustice. I can think of 10 countries where women and or children and or people are being persecuted or being hurt. But the idea of us going to be able to use our armed forces to solve every single internal problem that exists throughout the world is not within our capacity.”
Brennan then asked if Biden would bear any “responsibility for the outcome if the Taliban ends up back in control and women end up losing their rights?” Biden replied that he didn’t. “Are you telling me that we should go to war with China because what they’re doing to the Uyghurs, a million Uyghurs, in concentration camps? Is that what you’re saying to me?”
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