Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected the Pentagon’s suggestion that the State Department was solely responsible for delaying the Afghanistan withdrawal as the simmering blame game for the Kabul chaos bursts into the public eye.
“I don’t think anyone can say that we took any of the decisions that we took alone — one agency making the decision,” Blinken said Thursday while traveling in Pittsburgh. “We did it together.”
President Joe Biden’s national security team has tried to maintain an appearance of unity throughout his first year in office, but their discipline has been tested by Afghanistan and subsequent congressional backlash. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, under the hot lights in a pair of high-profile hearings this week, implied that Defense Department officials showed more foresight than their diplomatic counterparts.
“We began thinking about the possibilities of a noncombatant evacuation as far back as this spring,” Austin told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “As for when we started evacuations, we offered input to State — to the State Department’s decision, mindful of their concerns that moving too soon might actually cause the very collapse of the Afghan government that we all wanted to avoid and that moving too late would put our people and our operations at greater risk. And as I said, the fact that our troops were on the ground so quickly is due in large part to our planning and our pre-positioning of forces.”
Milley was more emphatic in a subsequent classified hearing, telling lawmakers Blinken’s team “waited too long” to initiate the evacuation operation, according to Axios. The timing of that effort, in conjunction with the Taliban’s conquest of every major Afghan city within 11 days in August, left U.S. forces in the dangerous position of trying to extract Western officials and diplomats from Kabul under the gaze of Taliban militants and incoming attacks from Islamic State’s Afghanistan affiliate.
“Noncombatant evacuations remains amongst the most — among the most challenging military operations even in the best of circumstances,” Austin said. “And the circumstances in August were anything but ideal.”
Blinken acknowledged the difficulties that beset the evacuation effort, which allowed roughly 125,000 people to escape the country but left scores of U.S. citizens and “the majority” of Afghans who partnered with the United States during the war. But he tried to drop the curtain on any internal disputes.
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“As the chairman of Joint Chiefs, Gen. Milley, said himself: No one anticipated that the security forces of Afghanistan, as well as the government, would collapse in the short period of time that they did,” Blinken said. “Everything we did, we did collectively, as a team, through a process. And, every voice was heard and listened to in that process.”
