Senior Biden administration officials and lawmakers are trading blame over the chaotic exit from the nearly 20-year-old war in Afghanistan.
“There is a process to follow,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Tuesday, pointing to the State Department when asked what could be done to speed up the evacuation of Afghans who aided the U.S. military mission inside the country.
In his Monday remarks at the White House, President Joe Biden blamed Afghan leaders, the U.S.-trained Afghan National Security Forces, and former President Donald Trump, who brokered a May 1 deal to leave the country, but he said little about his own administration’s role in executing the withdrawal. A talking points memo circulated by the White House shortly before Biden’s speech included one heading: “Was this an intelligence failure.”
Lawmakers had long called on the White House to speed up the processing of Special Immigrant Visas. Videos from Kabul airport on Monday showed frantic scenes.
“Intelligence officials have anticipated for years that in the absence of the U.S. military, the Taliban would continue to make gains in Afghanistan,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, said Monday. “That is exactly what has happened.”
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Defense equipment provided by the United States to Afghanistan, including guns, ammunition, and helicopters, has also fallen into Taliban hands.
“I am disappointed that the Biden administration clearly did not accurately assess the implications of a rapid U.S. withdrawal,” said New Jersey Democrat Bob Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
On Tuesday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters that leaving behind a two-decade intervention in another country’s war leads to difficult decisions, “none with clean outcomes.”
“What you can do is plan for all contingencies,” Sullivan said. “We did that.”
But analysts and former U.S. officials called the fallout “an unforced error” that could have been avoided.
“Biden should have known better,” said Bradley Bowman, Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior director and a former Army officer who served in Afghanistan, calling the withdrawal an “absolute” unforced error belonging to the commander-in-chief. “He owns this,” Bowman said.
Bowman pointed to Biden’s push to withdraw troops from Iraq in 2011, while vice president in the Obama administration, as a lesson unheeded. The president has voiced deep skepticism of American intervention overseas in recent years after spending years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before his vice presidency.
“That was another conditions-ignoring, timeline-based withdrawal that went against the advice of his commanders,” Bowman said of the Iraq pullout, noting Islamic State militants who ran roughshod over the Iraqi army. “We all know what happened three years later. We had ISIS, and the U.S. military had to return in force.”
In March, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin advised the president of a worst-case scenario for the Afghanistan exit, and invoked Iraq, a troop withdrawal Austin oversaw. “We’ve seen this movie before,” Austin told Biden, according to the New York Times.
Biden, Bowman said, “did the exact same thing, demonstrating he learned little to nothing from the experience in Iraq between 2011 and 2014.”
Defending his decision, Biden said Monday that the “buck stops with me.” Still, he laid sweeping blame for the unraveling across a litany of others while struggling to explain his administration’s failure to recognize the coming catastrophe.
“I don’t think it’s going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in June, just weeks before Taliban insurgents put this same timeline into action.
Biden drew criticism after he argued Monday that some Afghans “did not want to leave earlier — still hopeful for their country,” and his administration had been discouraged from urging evacuations by the Afghan government, who feared triggering “a crisis of confidence.”
Asked how the White House envisaged its ties to any remaining Afghan forces, Sullivan told the Washington Examiner these had largely dissolved.
“Afghan forces appear to have essentially — are no longer operating as a coherent entity,” Sullivan said, but he did not answer a question regarding the future of the U.S. relationship with the army that it spent tens of billions of dollars to train. Asked for further details, a White House official directed the question to the Defense Department.
Bowman charged that Biden kept to a deal that the Taliban violated long ago by maintaining ties with al Qaeda.
“It’s clear President Biden believed in this decision deeply. And he was going to do it, regardless of what he was hearing from the intelligence community and from the Pentagon,” Bowman said, using the Trump administration’s agreement with the Taliban “as a fig leaf” to proceed.
Biden, who traveled back and forth between Camp David after spending the weekend there, did not speak to other world leaders until Tuesday afternoon when the White House said he talked to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. On Wednesday, he spoke with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The last several days have marked the most devastating stretch so far in Biden’s presidency as the U.S.-backed Afghan government collapsed, sending thousands of Afghans who had worked alongside American troops fleeing for safety.
While Biden aides have cited broad public backing for leaving Afghanistan after two decades, support for the decision appeared to buckle.
A Morning Consult/Politico survey conducted from Aug. 13-16 showed a 20-point drop in support for the withdrawal, to 49% from 69% earlier this year.
Biden’s approval rating fell to 46% in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted Monday evening, the lowest number in the weekly survey since the president took office. On Friday, 53% of adults said they approved of Biden’s performance in office.
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The change is significant. Biden’s 12- point approval margin last week has collapsed and is now underwater by 1 point.
