“Last night [8/30/2021] in Kabul, the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan — the longest war in American history. …
In April, I made the decision to end this war. As part of that decision, we set the date of August 31st for American troops to withdraw. The assumption was that more than 300,000 Afghan National Security Forces that we had trained over the past two decades and equipped would be a strong adversary in their civil wars with the Taliban.
That assumption — that the Afghan government would be able to hold on for a period of time beyond military drawdown — turned out not to be accurate.”
– Joe Biden via The White House Briefing Room, “Remarks by President Biden on the End of the War in Afghanistan,” whitehouse.gov, August 31, 2021