The Pentagon rejected the idea the chaos at the airport in Kabul that unfolded Monday, amid frantic evacuations and the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, should be described as a “failure.”
Reporters peppered Defense Department officials with questions at a briefing following President Joe Biden’s address to the nation, in which he defended the decision to withdraw U.S. military forces from the country after 20 years of fighting.
CNN’s Barbara Starr asked about reports and photos of more than 600 Afghans being crammed into a C-17 cargo jet, more than the Air Force plane was designed to carry, in a flight out of Kabul. She also asked about other scenes of chaos at the airport, where thousands of U.S. military troops were sent to assist with and protect the evacuations that were temporarily halted to clear the airfield.
“So, my two questions are what failed in your planning because you didn’t plan for this. You would not have planned to fly in such dangerous circumstances. And how do you determine where the responsibility lies for this failure?”
BIDEN: ‘I STAND SQUARELY BEHIND MY DECISION’ ON AFGHANISTAN
Pentagon press secretary John Kirby began his answer by rejecting the premise of her question.
“Well, first of all, Barbara, I would take issue with your designation of this operation at the airport as a failure. But let’s get back to that in a second,” he said.
Following a brief interjection by Starr, Kirby continued his response, discussing how the military made plans to “mitigate risk and to try to be ready for unforeseen circumstances.”
Kirby said the exercises conducted focused on noncombatant evacuation operations at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. But he acknowledged that even the best-laid plans don’t always pan out.
“Now, could we have predicted every single scenario and every single breach around the perimeter of the airport with only a couple of thousand troops on the ground? Absolutely, you know, there are changes that happen. So, plans are terrific, and we take them seriously. But they are not and never have been perfectly predictive,” he said.
Later in the briefing, Kirby said he did not have “any additional information” about the jampacked C-17 flight and said he did not have an update “in terms of specific validity” of video footage “we’ve all seen of something falling off the wing” of an aircraft taking off.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Videos circulating on social media depict people falling from planes shortly after they take off. Other videos showed people swarming the aircraft used to evacuate U.S. citizens and Afghan allies. At least eight people died at the airport on Monday. Three Afghans who were holding on to the side of a C-17 as it moved across the runway fell off and were run over, according to U.S. officials cited by the Wall Street Journal.
“We’ll continue to try to dig down and see if there’s more information that can be had about that. It’s obviously difficult from 8,000 miles away to have perfect knowledge about everything that’s going on on the ground over there. But, again, we’re working hard to secure, to keep the airport secure, and keep these operations sustained now that they’re back on track,” Kirby said.
