It’s as if we knew this news before it finally came out. There was no way the Biden administration was at all prepared for the chaos that followed the President’s decision to issue a swift and complete withdrawal from Afghanistan given the death and destruction that followed.
With no attempt to actively mitigate the situation, only downplay the results, it now appears that the entire withdrawal was a chaotic mess right up until the moment before the order was given and Kabul fell to the Taliban.
Leaked notes from a White House Situation Room meeting now show that Biden officials were “frustrated” and “stuck” in a bureaucratic quagmire right up until the very end about how, if at all, to handle a widescale evacuation:
Leaked notes from a White House Situation Room meeting the day before Kabul fell shed new light on just how unprepared the Biden administration was to evacuate Afghan nationals who’d helped the United States in its 20-year war against the Taliban.
Why it matters: Hours before the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan’s capital on Aug. 15, 2021, senior Biden administration officials were still discussing and assigning basic actions involved in a mass civilian evacuation.
• Outsiders were frustrated and suspicious the administration was having plenty of meetings but was stuck in bureaucratic inertia and lacked urgency until the last minute.
• While the word “immediately” peppers the document, it’s clear officials were still scrambling to finalize their plans — on the afternoon of Aug. 14.
• For example, they’d just decided they needed to notify local Afghan staff “to begin to register their interest in relocation to the United States,” the document says.
• And they were still determining which countries could serve as transit points for evacuees.
The leaked memo itself is available here if you want to see the original document.
For some inexplicable reason, a failure of intelligence led them to believe they would have weeks or perhaps months of time before the Taliban took over full control of the country. Instead, that happened in hours practically, and the entire country descended into anarchy and chaos.
Any semblance of an evacuation plan was still being worked out in the hours before the withdrawal order came down. In short, there was no real plan for withdrawal or for safely evacuating U.S citizens, residents, and Aghan allies before the Taliban took over:
Between the lines: The meeting notes highlight how many crucial actions the Biden administration was deciding at the last minute — just hours before Kabul would fall and former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani would flee his palace in a helicopter.
Action items decided in meeting included:
• “State will work to identify as many countries as possible to serve as transit points. Transit points need to be able to accommodate U.S. citizens, Afghan nationals, third country nationals, and other evacuees. (Action: State, immediately)”
• “Embassy Kabul will notify LES [locally employed staff] to begin to register their interest in relocation to the United States and begin to prepare immediately for departure… (Action: Embassy Kabul, immediately)“
As the Taliban seized power, the White House realized that it failed to adequately prepare or envision such a swift takeover. The resulting plan playing out on live television, of Aghan citizens falling off military cargo planes, was the embodiment of the chaos within this administration and failure to prepare for such a predictable outcome.
Instead, Biden attempted to blame Trump for hemming him in on the May timeframe, an excuse which could be laughable if it wasn’t so deadly.
Biden’s failures resulted in the 13 dead U.S. troops following an ISIS terrorist attack at the Kabul airport. His actions left thousands of others stranded and undoubtedly more perished as a result.
Axios isn’t the only outlet doing reporting on the matter recently. Days ago, the Atlantic came out with an explosive story summing up similar lines of chaos and failure within the administration:
Joe Biden didn’t prioritize the evacuation of Afghan allies in the run-up to America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, George Packer reports. An investigation reveals that the president allowed concern about optics to get in the way of saving their lives. https://t.co/vAvedsA6DL
— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) January 31, 2022
Optics getting in the way of saving lives? Can you imagine if this type of story leaked and was written about former President Trump? Democrats would’ve drawn up articles of impeachment on the spot, and rightly so.
President Biden is already a failure president, his first year was a demonstrable mess of broken promises, record inflation, and a botched Covid plan.
His failure in Afghanistan, however, perhaps tops it all in the way he pushed forward with blatant disregard for human life in favor of a single-minded goal of withdrawing U.S. forces from the region.
Biden has yet to face serious consequences or take accountability for how badly his administration handled the Afghanistan withdrawal.
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