Sullivan says 'history has judged well' Biden’s call to withdraw from Afghanistan

National security adviser Jake Sullivan said Sunday that President Biden made the right strategic call to withdraw from Afghanistan three years ago and that history reflects well on that decision.

"The strategic call President Biden made, looking back three years, history has judged well and will continue to judge well," Sullivan said in an interview on CNN's "State of the Union."

"From the point of view that, if we were still in Afghanistan today, Americans would be fighting and dying; Russia would have more leverage over us; we would be less able to respond to the major strategic challenges we face," he continued.

Sullivan also pointed to the recent example of the New Year's Day attack in New Orleans, noting that "although the investigation continues," the FBI has not seen "any connection between Afghanistan and the attacker in New Orleans."

“Now, the FBI will continue to look for foreign connections. Maybe we'll find one, but what we've seen is proof of what President Biden said, which is that the terrorist threat has gotten more diffuse and more metastasized elsewhere, including homegrown extremists here in the United States who have committed terrorist attacks,” Sullivan said. “Not just under President Biden, but under President Trump in his first term.”

“And that is part of why we had to move our focus from a hot war in Afghanistan to a larger counterterrorism effort across the world,” he added.

Sullivan declined to respond to reports that he had offered to resign after the Afghanistan withdrawal, saying he would not divulge details of his personal conversations with the president.

“What I can tell you,” he added, “is that the United States of America is definitively better off that we are not entering our 25th year of Americans fighting and dying in Afghanistan.”

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