Biden Official Brushes Off Getting Afghanistan Situation ‘So Wrong’
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is admitting that Biden administration officials are surprised by how quickly the Taliban took over Afghanistan. During an interview on NBC’s “Today,” co-host Savannah Guthrie…
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is admitting that Biden administration officials are surprised by how quickly the Taliban took over Afghanistan.
During an interview on NBC’s “Today,” co-host Savannah Guthrie played Sullivan clips of President Joe Biden predicting that it was “highly unlikely” that the Taliban would take over the country.
In July, the president declared, “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.”
Guthrie said, “And yet that is precisely what we have seen over these last few days. How do you explain getting this so wrong?”
“Well first, Savannah, to be fair, the helicopter has been the mode of transport from our embassy to the airport for the last 20 years,” Sullivan began.
Guthrie retorted, “But you know the larger point, it’s not the helicopter. It’s not the mechanism. No, no, it’s the last-minute scramble, you know that, it’s the last-minute scramble when the assurances from the president himself were this was not what we were going to see.”
Sullivan noted that “the speed with which cities fell was much greater than anyone anticipated.”
“At the end of the day, despite the fact that we spent 20 years and tens of billions of dollars, to give the best equipment, the best training, and the best capacity to the Afghan national security forces, we could not give them the will. And they ultimately decided that they would not fight for Kabul and they would not fight for the country,” he added.