NEW DELHI: Falling short of the exact words, US President Joe Biden in his public address on Afghanistan on late Monday evening said he was very clear on one thing, that he would not repeat the mistakes made in the past, referring to sending troops to Afghanistan.

"I will not repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past — the mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely in a conflict that is not in the national interest of the United States, of doubling down on a civil war in a foreign country, of attempting to remake a country through the endless military deployments of US forces."

Biden added to his statement and said, "Those are the mistakes we cannot continue to repeat because we have significant vital interests in the world that we cannot afford to ignore."

The US President defended his decision of withdrawal from Afghanistan and said, "I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces."

Biden said that the US went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals, first to get those who perpetrated the attacks on September 11th, 2001, and second to make sure al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again.

He added that those goals were achieved, "We severely degraded al Qaeda in Afghanistan. We never gave up the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and we got him. That was a decade ago."

The president also made it clear that the U.S mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building. "It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy and the only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been, that is preventing a terrorist attack on the American homeland," he said.

The US President said that they spent over a trillion dollars to train and equip the Afghan forces but they were not willing to fight for themselves and they ran away abandoning their own people, thus, he added the US is not fighting in Afghanistan anymore.