n the days following the catastrophic withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, members of the Biden administration are now pointing fingers at one another over the debacle.
On Wednesday, CNN reported that the Department of Defense and the State Department are at odds with one another and the Intelligence Community.
The three blocks are blaming each other for the systemic failures that led to the collapse of the Afghan government and subsequent Taliban takeover, which happened within a matter of days.
“Military officials have said that for weeks they urged the State Department to move faster in evacuating its diplomatic personnel. State Department officials have said they were operating based on intelligence assessments that suggested they had more time, but intelligence officials insist that they had long reported the possibility of a rapid Taliban takeover,” CNN reported.
According to CNN, an intelligence assessment produced by the Intelligence Community estimated that the Taliban was seeking to overthrow the government in Afghanistan and establish a total military victory, according to a source familiar with the assessment.
The internal report came despite US efforts to negotiate for peace with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, with the Biden administration continuing to express confidence in those negotiations.
On July 8, President Joe Biden confidently informed the press that the Afghan government would not fall thanks to its armaments and training provided by the US military.
The President promised that we would not see mass evacuations, like the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.
Last weekend’s events proved Biden wrong, forcing him to make numerous seemingly contradictory statements pinning the disaster on a multitude of different factors, including blaming the Afghan military’s will to fight, as well as Donald Trump, from who Biden claims he inherited the Afghan problem.
A New York Times report on Tuesday directly conflicts with the Biden administration’s claim that the fall of Afghanistan was sudden and unexpected, reporting that the administration knew of the potential outcome no less than three weeks ago, that Afghanistan was on the verge of collapsing to the Taliban incursion.
“Classified assessments by American spy agencies over the summer painted an increasingly grim picture of the prospect of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and warned of the rapid collapse of the Afghan military, even as President Biden and his advisers said publicly that was unlikely to happen as quickly, according to current and former American government officials,” the newspaper reported.
“By July, many intelligence reports grew more pessimistic, questioning whether any Afghan security forces would muster serious resistance and whether the government could hold on in Kabul, the capital,” the report continued. “President Biden said on July 8 that the Afghan government was unlikely to fall and that there would be no chaotic evacuations of Americans similar to the end of the Vietnam War.”
Ahead of the report, White House officials told CNN that “Biden got bad advice from some of his top military and intelligence advisors.” The New York Times report contradicts this claim.
“One White House official pointed to Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley’s comments from three weeks ago when he suggested the Afghan forces had the capacity to fight for and defend their country, and that a Taliban takeover was not a foregone conclusion,” CNN reported on Tuesday.
Despite claims and denials from the Biden administration, military officials refuted the administration, telling CNN that they warned the State Department for weeks that it needed to evacuate embassy employees.
Indeed, the US embassy in Kabul withdrew several personnel over the past few months, but only accelerated the evacuation in the final week as the Taliban started taking over Afghanistan.
Biden’s claim that the Afghan military refused to put up a fight against the Taliban is also in dispute as reports on Wednesday show that remnants of the Afghan military are continuing to fight against the Taliban, most notably in Panjshir Valley, where they scored a major victory against Taliban forces in the region.
