The past week has been dominated by one story and one story only: The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, culminating in the seizure of Kabul on Sunday. The fallout has been devastating, and the Biden administration has struggled to answer for what appears to be a catastrophic intelligence and military miscalculation.
President Joe Biden himself has been forced to appear three times to justify the decision to pull out, in two addresses and a testy interview with ABC News.
Here are the quotes of the week.
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“What Joe Biden has done with Afghanistan is legendary. It will go down as one of the greatest defeats in American history! … It is time for Joe Biden to resign in disgrace for what he has allowed to happen to Afghanistan … It shouldn’t be a big deal, because he wasn’t elected legitimately in the first place!”
— Former President Donald Trump.
“We would have been back at war with the Taliban. And we would have been back at war, with tens of thousands of troops having to go in, because the 2,500 troops we had there and the air power would not have sufficed to deal with the situation, especially as we see, alas, the hollowness of the Afghan security forces.”
– Antony Blinken, secretary of state.
“I wouldn’t have let my 10-year-old son get away from this kind of pathetic blame-shifting … It’s worth noting this did not happen on our watch. We reduced our forces significantly, and the Taliban didn’t advance on capitals all across Afghanistan. So, it’s just a plain old fact that this is happening under the Biden administration’s leadership.”
– Mike Pompeo, Blinken’s predecessor at the State Department.
“Actually Savannah, I think the worst-case scenario for the United States would be a circumstance in which we were adding back in thousands and thousands of troops to fight and die in a civil war in Afghanistan when the Afghan army wasn’t prepared to fight in it itself.
That was the alternative choice Joe Biden faced, and what we’ve learned over the course of the past two weeks is that if we had stayed one more year or two more years or five more years or 10 more years, no amount of training, equipping, or money or lives lost by the United States was going to put the Afghan army in a position to be able to sustain that country on its own.”
– Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, during a testy interview with Today anchor Savannah Guthrie.
“Terrorists and major competitors like China are watching the embarrassment of a superpower laid low.”
– Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s statement on Afghanistan.
“Where is my president, former President [Ashraf] Ghani?
We don’t have any president, we don’t have anything.
Afghan people, they don’t know what to do.
Women in Afghanistan have a lot of achievement. I have a lot of achievement.
I lived from the Taliban like 20 years ago. Now we go back to the first step again.”
– A female reporter from Afghanistan tearfully challenges Pentagon spokesman John Kirby during the developments on Monday.
“Our women are Muslim. They will also be happy to be living within our framework of Sharia.”
– Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid says the country’s women will adhere to the strict Islamic fundamentalist moral code.
“What President Biden has done is to embrace the Afghan policy of President Trump, and this is the outcome.
“I’m left with some grave questions in my mind about his ability to lead our nation as commander in chief … to have read this so wrong — or, even worse, to have understood what was likely to happen and not care.”
– Ryan Crocker, former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
“We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force — something the Taliban doesn’t have. Taliban does not have an air force. We provided close air support.
We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.
There’s some very brave and capable Afghan special forces units and soldiers, but if Afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance to the Taliban now, there is no chance that one year — one more year, five more years, or 20 more years of U.S. military boots on the ground would’ve made any difference.”
When I hosted President Ghani and Chairman Abdullah at the White House in June and again when I spoke by phone to Ghani in July, we had very frank conversations. We talked about how Afghanistan should prepare to fight their civil wars after the U.S. military departed to clean up the corruption in government so the government could function for the Afghan people. We talked extensively about the need for Afghan leaders to unite politically.
They failed to do any of that.
I am president of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me.
I am deeply saddened by the facts we now face. But I do not regret my decision to end America’s warfighting in Afghanistan and maintain a laser-focus on our counterterrorism missions there and in other parts of the world.
– Several extracts from President Joe Biden’s speech on Monday, after Kabul had fallen to the Taliban, with the extremist group taking over the country.
BIDEN: Oh, there is. But, look — but no one’s being killed right now, God forgive me if I’m wrong about that, but no one’s being killed right now. People are — we got 1,000-somewhat, 1,200 out, yesterday, a couple thousand today. And it’s increasing. We’re gonna get those people out.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But we’ve all seen the pictures. We’ve seen those hundreds of people packed into a C-17. You’ve seen Afghans falling —
BIDEN: That was four days ago, five days ago.
– Biden responds to George Stephanopolous pushing him on harrowing images of Afghans falling from a military plane.
“We have made — kept every commitment. We made a sacred commitment to Article Five that if, in fact, anyone were to invade or take action against our NATO allies, we would respond. Same with Japan, same with South Korea, same with — Taiwan. It’s not even comparable to talk about that.”
– Biden makes a commitment to defend Taiwan, which was later walked back by administration officials.
“There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.”
– Chairman of Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley contends neither he nor anyone else had seen evidence the Afghan government would collapse as swiftly as it did.
“There were gunshots up in the air. The 10-year-old got hit by shrapnel. The 14-year-old lost her shoe and got her ankle stepped on. The crowds were just pushing in. There were men with knives trying to steal cellphones,”
– A woman recounting what her family friends told her of their attempt to make it into Kabul’s airport.
“Any American who wants to come home, we will get you home,”
– Biden in remarks on Friday, his third attempt this week at concerns over the spiraling security situation inside the country and his first taking questions from reporters.
“We got all kinds of cables, all kinds of advice. If you notice, it ranged from this group saying — they didn’t say it would fall when it would fall, when it did fall — but saying it would fall to others saying it wouldn’t happen for a long time and they’d be able to sustain themselves through the end of the year.
I made the decision. The buck stops with me. I took the consensus opinion. The consensus opinion was that, in fact, it would not occur, if it occurred, until later in the year. It was my decision.
– Biden explains why he hadn’t done more to get Americans out of Afghanistan following a July dissent cable being sent from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul to the State Department, warning about a swift Taliban takeover following the U.S. troop withdrawal in August.
“I haven’t seen an estimate on that … I don’t know that we have an exact estimate … We know that al Qaeda is a presence, as well as ISIS, in Afghanistan, and we’ve talked about that for quite some time. We do not believe it is exorbitantly high, but we don’t have an exact figure for you.
As I think you might understand … it’s not like they carry identification cards and register somewhere. We don’t have a perfect picture. And our ability — our intelligence gathering ability in Afghanistan isn’t what it used to be because we aren’t there in the same numbers that we used to be … What we believe is that there isn’t a presence that is significant enough to merit a threat to our homeland as there was back on 9/11 20 years ago.”
– Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, moments after Biden said al Qaeda was no longer in Afghanistan.
