President Joe Biden and his team continue to struggle with their public messaging on Afghanistan more than a week after the fall of Kabul thrust the situation into the national spotlight.
Top Biden administration officials have put forward inaccurate, conflicting, or misleading information about the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan for weeks.
WHITE HOUSE FIGHTS TO REGAIN CONTROL OF ITS MESSAGE ON AFGHANISTAN
Their inability to defend a floundering evacuation effort has compounded the political fallout for Biden at home, where lawmakers outraged by the apparent lack of planning behind the drawdown have been angered even further by scrambled signals from the White House.
Here are some of the inaccurate or misleading messages from Biden officials.
VISA PROCESSING
National security adviser Jake Sullivan attempted to blame a massive backlog of Special Immigrant Visas on former Trump officials during a briefing Monday.
“When we took office in January, the Trump administration had not processed a single Special Immigrant Visa since March of 2020, in nearly a year,” Sullivan said.
His statement is untrue: The Trump State Department issued hundreds of Special Immigrant Visas to Afghans throughout 2020, according to quarterly reports on the program.
Sullivan’s accusation was part of an effort to tout the number of visas the Biden administration has issued to Afghans desperate to flee the country, pointing to efforts by the administration and Congress to streamline a 14-step process that often takes more than a year under normal circumstances.
The White House later said Sullivan misspoke and intended to say no Special Immigrant Visa interviews had taken place during that time frame.
But the interview portion of the process was largely suspended after March 2020 due to COVID rules, not because the Trump administration blocked access. The State Department reports indicate a small number of Afghans did have interviews scheduled outside Kabul, where the embassy was not offering in-person services.
‘STRANDED’ AMERICANS
White House press secretary Jen Psaki pushed back on the suggestion American citizens are trapped in the Taliban-controlled country as the end of the evacuation nears.
“I think it’s irresponsible to say Americans are stranded,” Psaki pointedly told Fox News reporter Peter Doocy at the White House on Monday. “They are not. We are committed to bringing Americans who want to come home, home.”
Multiple reports have suggested that Americans in Kabul cannot get through the chaos, violence, and bureaucratic confusion surrounding the airport.
The Biden administration has estimated more than 10,000 Americans were in Afghanistan before the evacuation began. The Pentagon has evacuated less than half from Kabul, and officials said they don’t know precisely how many Americans are in Taliban-controlled parts of the country that may be nowhere near the sole evacuation site.
AL QAEDA PRESENCE
Biden defended the withdrawal by falsely claiming al Qaeda had been eradicated from Afghanistan — something his own Pentagon contradicted later that same afternoon.
“Let’s put this thing in perspective here,” Biden said on Friday. “What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point, with al Qaeda gone? We went to Afghanistan for the express purpose of getting rid of al Qaeda in Afghanistan, as well as getting Osama bin Laden. And we did.”
However, al Qaeda remains active in Afghanistan — a fact Pentagon spokesman John Kirby shared with reporters at a briefing moments after Biden spoke.
“We know that al Qaeda is a presence, as well as ISIS, in Afghanistan, and we’ve talked about that for quite some time,” Kirby said, adding the Pentagon does not have a precise idea of how many members the group retains. “We do not believe it is exorbitantly high, but we don’t have an exact figure for you.”
Sullivan later attempted to clean up the president’s statement, claiming Biden meant the group’s strength and not its physical presence.
“The president was referring to al Qaeda’s capability to attack the United States, which the intelligence community tells us today is not present in Afghanistan,” Sullivan told reporters Monday in a briefing.
However, Sullivan did acknowledge that “there’s the possibility that al Qaeda could reconstitute an external plotting capability in Afghanistan” after the U.S. forces leave.
NO CREDIBILITY QUESTIONS
Biden brushed off growing international skepticism of American credibility on Friday when he claimed not to have seen that kind of criticism from U.S. allies.
“I have seen no question of our credibility from our allies around the world,” Biden said.
His claim came despite widespread condemnation of his handling of the withdrawal — both from within the U.S. and among allies.
Members of British Parliament expressed outrage last week during an emergency session, as some British lawmakers took aim at Biden specifically.
Armin Laschet, touted as the successor to Angela Merkel as German chancellor, called the situation in Afghanistan “the greatest debacle that NATO has seen since its foundation.”
AIRPORT ACCESS
Biden said on Friday the administration has seen no evidence Americans are struggling to get to the airport in Kabul — despite several reports the Taliban has choked off access throughout the area.
“We have no indication that they haven’t been able to get — in Kabul — through the airport,” Biden said. “We’ve made an agreement with the — with the Taliban. Thus far, they’ve allowed them to go through.”
The State Department issued a warning to Americans in Afghanistan on Saturday to stay away from the airport due to security threats, which officials have said include threats from ISIS.
There have been numerous reports of Americans who have been unable to break through Taliban lines to get inside the airport. The Pentagon has said it dispatched some forces to rescue stranded Americans blocked from getting to the airport on their own.
One such mission reportedly involved airlifting more than 100 Americans from a hotel via helicopter just 600 feet away from the airport.
INTELLIGENCE
Biden said the unraveling of security in Kabul was inevitable — despite assuring the public in early July there was “no circumstance” in which embassy personnel and others would need to be airlifted hastily out of a volatile situation.
“The idea that somehow, there’s a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don’t know how that happens,” Biden told ABC last week.
Setting aside the contradiction between Biden’s own words between July and August, Biden’s assertion also contradicts what some of his military leaders anticipated regarding the country’s collapse.
“There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days,” said Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, last week.
Several reports have deepened questions about what intelligence Biden may have reviewed before forging ahead with his withdrawal plans. Those reports have suggested some intelligence agencies warned with increasing urgency Afghan forces were at risk of folding to the Taliban more quickly than initially estimated, and that U.S. diplomats sent a warning within the State Department that evacuations needed to start by the beginning of the month due to the likelihood of a swift attack on Kabul.
FRIDAY TO MONDAY
Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified before a House committee in June that if Afghanistan were to collapse, the security situation would devolve gradually — not over a few days.
“Whatever happens in Afghanistan, if there is a significant deterioration in security, that could well happen — we have discussed this before. I do not think it is going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday,” Blinken said in his testimony.
Blinken said he would not “necessarily equate the departure of forces in July, August, or by early September with some kind of immediate deterioration in the situation.”
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But an immediate deterioration of the security situation is exactly what happened earlier this month when Taliban forces, which had been picking off towns and provinces in recent weeks, reached Kabul and seized control of the capital city over a weekend, forcing a hasty retreat from the U.S. Embassy.
Like other administration officials speaking about the withdrawal earlier in the summer, Blinken reflected a confidence in the ability of Afghan security forces that was not supported by the actual circumstances.
