Secretary of State Antony Blinken mistakenly referred to a former president of Afghanistan on Sunday instead of the deposed leader who fled the country as the Taliban took control of Kabul.
Blinken, while discussing the rapid evacuations in Afghanistan, confused ousted President Ashraf Ghani with Hamid Karzai, who led Afghanistan’s first government after the Taliban were overthrown in 2001 and was president until 2014.
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“Go back a week. The government fell. And by the way, I was on the phone with President Karzai the day before, when he was telling me his intent, as he put it, ‘to fight to the death.’ Well, the next day, he was gone,” Blinken said during a Sunday interview on CBS’s Face the Nation.
The State Department appeared to confirm that Blinken meant to say he had spoken with Ghani, not Karzai, by correcting its transcript of the interview.
The Biden administration has been working to protect Americans and Afghan allies who have found themselves at risk of violent persecution after the Taliban quickly and easily rose to power in Afghanistan, the speed of which caught U.S. officials by surprise.
Military and intelligence experts said for years that the Taliban could defeat the Afghan army, which had both greater numbers and nearly two decades of U.S. military training, in a matter of months. In reality, it only took the militant group approximately 11 days.
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There have been approximately 30,000 people evacuated since the end of July, with about 25,100 since Aug. 14, a White House official said on Sunday. The United States was able to evacuate 3,900 people from 3 a.m. Saturday to 3 a.m. Sunday on 23 military flights, while 35 coalition aircraft were able to evacuate roughly the same number of people over the same period of time.
