President Joe Biden is facing repeated questioning regarding his previous remark that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was “highly unlikely.”
The president was pressed during a “Good Morning America” interview about his remarks in July where he said, “The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”
He suggested at the time that a Taliban takeover is not inevitable and the Afghan army is as “well equipped as any army in the world,” according to The Hill.
“Was the intelligence wrong or did you downplay it?” ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos asked.
Biden then claimed there was “no consensus” and that the intelligence reports said a Taliban takeover would more likely happen by the end of the year.
However, Stephanopoulos pressed, noting that the president “didn’t put a timeline out” when he said it was it was “highly unlikely.”
“You just said it flat out it’s highly unlikely the Taliban would takeover,” Stephanopoulos said.
Biden responded, “Yeah, well the question was whether or not– the idea that the Taliban would take over was premised on the notion that somehow the 300,000 troops we had trained and equipped was just going to collapse.” (The president has received three “Pinocchios” from The Washington Post for the 300,000 figure.)
Watch Biden’s interview below:
EXCLUSIVE: Asked about July comment that a Taliban takeover was “highly unlikely,” Pres. @JoeBiden tells @GStephanopoulos, “there was no consensus” in the intelligence. “They said it was more likely to be by the end of the year.” https://t.co/NmBEmVRw8M pic.twitter.com/LSXSC51ox8
— Good Morning America (@GMA) August 19, 2021
Additionally, Biden said he did not think the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban was a “failure.” He also said there was not a way for the U.S. to leave Afghanistan without “chaos ensuing.”
CNN’s White House reporter Stephen Collinson writes, “Biden is failing to adequately explain why he so badly failed to predict the swift collapse of the Afghan state. And his credibility has been sullied because his confident downplaying of the risks of the withdrawal has been repeatedly confounded by events. Seven months into his term, Biden no longer gets credit simply for not being Donald Trump.”
The New York Times reported on Tuesday, “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 publication’s report continued, “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.”
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Wednesday, “I’m seeing all over the news that there were warnings of a rapid collapse. I have said previously from this podium and in sworn testimony before Congress that the intelligence clearly indicated multiple scenarios were possible. One of those was an outright Taliban take over following a rapid collapse of the Afghan security forces and the government, another was a civil war, and a third was negotiated settlement.”
He added, “However, the time frame of a rapid collapse that was widely estimated it ranged at weeks to months and even years following our departure. There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.”
Additionally, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said on Tuesday, “We were clear-eyed going in when we made this decision that it was possible that the Taliban would end up in control of Afghanistan. We were clear-eyed about that.”
“Now, as the president said in his remarks yesterday, we did not anticipate that it would happen at this speed,” he said during a White House press briefing.
