Biden officials admit miscalculation as Afghanistan's national forces and government rapidly fall
(CNN)
President Joe Biden and his administration struggled Sunday to project order amid a race by American and other foreign personnel to evacuate Afghanistan as
Taliban fighters entered Kabul.
The rapid fall of Afghanistan's national forces and government has come as a shock to Biden and senior members of his administration, who only last month believed it could take months before the civilian government in Kabul fell -- allowing a period of time after American troops left before the full consequences of the withdrawal were laid bare.
Now, officials are frankly admitting they miscalculated.
"The fact of the matter is we've seen that that force has been unable to defend the country," Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union," referring to Afghanistan's national security forces. "And that has happened more quickly than we anticipated."
The risks for Biden politically are uncertain; a majority of Americans say in polls they support withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, and Biden's aides have calculated the country shares his weariness at prolonging a 20-year conflict.
Yet the chaotic scenes playing out as that war ends -- evoking the fall of Saigon in 1975, an image that haunted Biden as he weighed a withdrawal earlier this year -- are certain to trail Biden as the Taliban asserts control over large swaths of the country.
Already, some members of Congress are demanding more information from the administration on how its intelligence could have so badly misjudged the situation on the ground, or why more robust contingency plans for evacuating Americans and their allies weren't in place.
The notion the civilian government led by President Ashraf Ghani would be unable to withstand the Taliban's advances is not a surprise. Intelligence assessments over the past year have offered differing timetables for what was viewed by many national security officials as an inevitability.
Biden himself has said repeatedly over the last months, including when Ghani visited him in the Oval Office this summer, that Afghanistan's leaders would need to reconcile their differences if they had any hope of maintaining power.
And Blinken said Sunday that "we've known all along, we've said all along including the President, that the Taliban was at its greatest position of strength at any time since 2001 when it was last in charge of the country. That is the Taliban that we inherited. And so we saw they were very much capable of going on the offensive and beginning to take back the country."
Yet the downfall and collapse of the Afghan military has happened far quicker than Biden or his team expected.
Ghani left the country on Sunday for Tajikistan, two sources told CNN. Afghan Chairman of the High Council for National Reconciliation Abdullah Abdullah referred to him in a video statement as "former President."
American officials have expressed dismay at Ghani's inability to protect key cities and regions from the Taliban, despite laying out a strategy for doing so during his communications with Biden and other senior US leaders.
Biden used a question-and-answer session in the White House East Room a little more than a month ago to downplay the prospect the Afghan government could collapse and the Taliban could take over, saying that outcome was not inevitable. He insisted there would be "no circumstance" in which American personnel were evacuated from the roof of their embassy, rejecting any comparison to the fall of Saigon.
Last week, the President told reporters there was still a possibility the government could hold up, saying a newly installed military commander was a "serious fighter." And as recently as Friday, the administration said the Afghan capital of Kabul was not in an "imminent threat environment."
By Sunday morning, a US official was telling CNN that
evacuations of US personnel were well underway, with a goal to get US embassy personnel out by Tuesday morning, if not sooner, and -- not long after -- the majority of US embassy staff had been evacuated from the diplomatic compound in Kabul. CNN spotted US choppers shuttling employees from the embassy to evacuate them from the country amid the Taliban's advance.
The withdrawal of embassy personnel marks a rapid acceleration of the process that had only been announced on Thursday, and is a situation that many State Department security officials expected would have to happen given the speed with which the Taliban has gained territory in Afghanistan in recent days.
Biden, who is currently spending the weekend in Camp David as part of his summer vacation, is not scheduled to return to the White House until next week and has not spoken publicly about the situation in Afghanistan since Tuesday. He has no events on his public schedule listed for Sunday. A range of options are being debated -- about returning to Washington or addressing the nation -- but several officials said events were too fluid and no final decisions have been made as of Sunday afternoon.
While Biden can receive the same level of briefings from Camp David, as he has been doing throughout the weekend via a secure video conference, officials are aware of the optics of the President being out of town during this perilous moment. Several administration officials have also been on vacation, but began returning to work remotely Sunday or in the West Wing.
A White House official told CNN on Sunday that the President "has spoken to members of his national security team on the situation in Afghanistan and will continue to receive updates and be briefed throughout the day."
"He is deeply engaged from Camp David," one senior administration official said, who did not rule out the President returning to the White House.
After Saturday's briefing, Biden
authorized additional troops to Afghanistan "to make sure we can have an orderly and safe drawdown of US personnel and other allied personnel and an orderly and safe evacuation of Afghans who helped our troops during our mission and those at special risk from the Taliban advance."
But the administration official said the White House "did not want this to become the Biden administration's Katrina," a reference to the 2005 hurricane that the Bush administration was slow in responding to during his August vacation.
Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley on Sunday briefed members of Congress on the strategy for removals from the country and were pressed by lawmakers about the rapid timeline of the drawdown of US forces there.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy pushed the officials on why the process happened so quickly, saying, "We didn't give them air cover. You say you had this plan. No one would plan out this outcome. The ramifications of this for America will go on for decades and it won't just be in Afghanistan," according to a GOP source on the call.
President Joe Biden and his administration struggled Sunday to project order amid a race by American and other foreign personnel to evacuate Afghanistan as Taliban fighters entered Kabul.
edition.cnn.com
