WASHINGTON, 13 September 2021, (TON): resident Joe Biden, speaking unexpectedly during a visit to the Pennsylvania site of one of the 9/11 plane crashes, again defended the widely criticized withdrawal from Afghanistan.

"Could Al-Qaeda come back (in Afghanistan)?" he asked in an exchange with reporters outside a Shanksville fire station. "Yeah. But guess what, it's already back other places.

"What's the strategy? Every place where Al-Qaeda is, we're going to invade and have troops stay in? C'mon."

Biden said “it had always been a mistake to think Afghanistan could be meaningfully united.”

Biden said “American forces had achieved their central mission when a special forces team killed Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011 in a compound in Pakistan.”

The US intervention in Afghanistan began after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, eventually drawing the US, joined by key allies into its longest war.

Biden had begun his day Saturday in Manhattan, attending a televised ceremony marking the September 11 attacks there.

He had not been scheduled to make public remarks. But asked by a reporter about the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and a subsequent drop in his poll numbers, he shrugged it off.