Of course Joe Biden would have pulled out of Afghanistan regardless of who or what preceded him. His position hasn’t changed since 2009, when he pushed Barack Obama to end the fight against the Taliban and instead start focusing on Pakistan. But in a remarkable turn in yesterday’s interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Biden at first tried blaming Donald Trump for the withdrawal, and then did a Col. Jessup anyway.

You’re g******ed right I’d have ordered the Code Red:

BIDEN: No. No one said that to me that I can recall. Look, George, the reason why it’s been stable for a year is because the last president said, “We’re leaving. And here’s the deal I wanna make with you, Taliban. We’re agreeing to leave if you agree not to attack us between now and the time we leave on May the 1st.”

I got into office, George. Less than two months after I elected to office, I was sworn in, all of a sudden, I have a May 1 deadline. I have a May 1 deadline. I got one of two choices. Do I say we’re staying? And do you think we would not have to put a hell of a lot more troops? B– you know, we had hundreds– we had tens of thousands of troops there before. Tens of thousands.

Do you think we woulda — that we would’ve just said, “No problem. Don’t worry about it, we’re not gonna attack anybody. We’re okay”? In the meantime, the Taliban was takin’ territory all throughout the country in the north and down in the south, in the Pasthtun area.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So would you have withdrawn troops like this even if President Trump had not made that deal with the Taliban?

BIDEN: I would’ve tried to figure out how to withdraw those troops, yes, because look, George. There is no good time to leave Afghanistan. Fifteen years ago would’ve been a problem, 15 years from now. The basic choice is am I gonna send your sons and your daughters to war in Afghanistan in perpetuity?

STEPHANOPOULOS: That’s–

BIDEN: No one can name for me a time when this would end. And what– wha– wha– what– what constitutes defeat of the Taliban? What constitutes defeat? Would we have left then? Let’s say they surrender like before. OK. Do we leave then? Do you think anybody– the same people who think we should stay would’ve said, “No, good time to go”? We spent over $1 trillion, George, 20 years. There was no good time to leave.

If that’s the case, why bring up Trump at all? Not only is Trump’s “deal” irrelevant, Biden had already altered it by keeping troops past that same May 1 deadline, as Peter Bergen pointed out yesterday. We didn’t exit Bagram until July 1.

So, Stephanopoulos wondered, why not stick around longer to get everyone out? Biden responds that no one told him it would collapse that quickly:

STEPHANOPOULOS: But if there’s no good time, if you know you’re gonna have to leave eventually, why not have th– everything in place to make sure Americans could get out, to make sure our Afghan allies get out, so we don’t have these chaotic scenes in Kabul?

BIDEN: Number one, as you know, the intelligence community did not say back in June or July that, in fact, this was gonna collapse like it did. Number one.

STEPHANOPOULOS: They thought the Taliban would take over, but not this quickly?

BIDEN: But not this quickly. Not even close. We had already issued several thousand passports to the– the SIVs, the people– the– the– the translators when I came into office before we had negotiated getting out at the end of s– August.

If that’s truly the case, then Biden should fire everyone in the chain of command who failed to predict the rapidity of the collapse. This operation isn’t just a case of cutting a tow line in a naval live-fire exercise, after all. This operation left 10,000 or more Americans stranded behind Taliban lines, likely a lot more, plus tens of thousands of Afghan partners who are now being targeted by the Taliban. (More on that in a later post.) It’s a failure of historic proportions and one that will cost the US its prestige and possibly its security positions in places like South Korea and Taiwan. So where is the accountability for that failure?

Biden’s not imposing accountability for failure because he refuses to acknowledge failure at all. This is his policy, and Biden thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, so by definition there can’t be any acknowledgment of failure. Not even with ten thousand Americans trapped in and around Kabul, just waiting to become hostages for the radical Islamists that got handed the keys to the city.

On the political front, Politico points out that this admission “complicates” one of Biden’s top rhetorical defenses of blaming this mess on his predecessor:

President Joe Biden revealed in a new interview that he still would have sought to pull American forces out of Afghanistan even if former President Donald Trump had not struck a deal with the Taliban last year that paved the way for an eventual U.S. troop withdrawal. …

“Less than two months after I was elected to office — I was sworn in — all of a sudden, I have a May 1 deadline. I have a May 1 deadline,” Biden told ABC. “I have one of two choices. Do I say we’re staying? And do you think we would not have to put a hell of a lot more troops [in Afghanistan]?”

Biden put forth the same line of reasoning in a White House address Monday defending his decision on Afghanistan. “The choice I had to make, as your President, was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season,” he said.

But Biden’s latest statement that he would have pursued a pullout of U.S. troops regardless of Trump’s negotiations with the Taliban complicates the current administration’s argument for its own withdrawal order.

“Complicates” it? It entirely negates that defense. Biden would have pulled out no matter what, in the precise manner in which he did retreat. Biden has advocated for a retreat for twelve years. CNN’s Peter Bergen also pointed that out, along with the deception Biden and his team have employed in attempting to shift the blame to Trump for an operation entirely of their own design:

First, the Taliban never observed the terms of that agreement, including that they would break ties with al-Qaeda. According to a UN report released earlier this year, they didn’t.

Second, the agreement said that the Taliban would enter genuine peace negotiations with the Afghan government. That didn’t happen either.

Third, the US-Taliban agreement was negotiated without any input from the Afghan government — which, after all, was the elected government of the country. Conveniently for the Taliban, they don’t believe in elections. …

What the administration has done in Afghanistan doesn’t make much sense. Biden could have easily said the Taliban had reneged on their agreement with the United States so he could continue to keep a relatively small US military force in Afghanistan to advise and assist the Afghan Army and to support the Afghan Air Force to thwart Taliban advances.

But Biden also believes in the merits of leaving Afghanistan regardless of Trump’s agreement with the Taliban. He argues that the US can’t be mired in endless wars, even though the American presence in Afghanistan had shrunk to only 2,500 troops — particularly few for a force of 1.3 million active-duty US service personnel. That small force helped to sustain the Afghan military physically and psychologically, not least with close air support.

If the White House wanted to maintain a fiction that this was somehow Trump’s fault, then maybe they shouldn’t have put Biden on the air, even with a toady like Stephanopoulos. This demonstrates why Biden isn’t taking questions at press conferences this week, certainly.