A new report on leaked documents from a White House meeting shows how “unprepared” President Joe Biden’s administration was for the collapse of Afghanistan’s government.
Axios first reported on the “leaked notes from a White House Situation Room meeting the day before Kabul fell.”
According to the outlet, “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.”
The notes, dated Aug. 14, show that the day before Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, fell to the Taliban Biden administration officials “decided they needed to notify local Afghan staff ‘to begin to register their interest in relocation to the United States.'” Officials were also “still determining which countries could serve as transit points for evacuees.”
Biden was heavily criticized as the Taliban marched across Afghanistan with surprising speed as the nation’s security forces evaporated and its fighters entered Kabul on Aug. 15.
On July 8, he assured reporters, “The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”
But as the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan along with U.S. contractors, who helped train and maintain equipment for the Afghan military, the Taliban took over large swaths of the country.
Check out the graphic below to see a map of the Taliban’s progression:
The Taliban's increasing hold over Afghanistan.#AFPgraphics map showing parts of Afghanistan under government control and territories under the influence of the Taliban, from April to August pic.twitter.com/sPjEzgqXFO
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) August 12, 2021
Yet as the Taliban seized parts of the Afghanistan, the Biden administration did not get around to finalizing plans for what Axios called “basic actions involved in a mass civilian evacuation” until the last minute.
National Security Council spokesperson Emily Horne told Axios the documents were “cherry-picked” and “do not reflect the months of work that were already underway.”
Two days after that meeting took place, the world was stunned by images of Afghan civilians clinging to airplanes, with some plunging to their deaths as the U.S. rushed to evacuate 120,000 people.
Mark Jacobson, deputy NATO representative in Afghanistan during former President Barack Obama’s administration, told Axios, “That so much planning, prioritizing and addressing of key questions had not been completed, even as Kabul was about to fall, underscores the absence of adequate interagency planning.”
“This is especially surprising given the depth of experience on Afghanistan and contingency operations at that table,” he added.
As The Atlantic’s George Packer points out, Biden did not expect that Kabul would fall to the Taliban until 2022. But before it did fall, he argues the administration “could have timed the military withdrawal to support evacuations, rather than pulling out all the hard assets while leaving all the soft targets behind.”
“It could have begun to quietly organize flights on commercial aircraft in the spring—moving 1,000 people a week—and gradually increased the numbers. It could have used the prospect of lifting sanctions and giving international recognition to a future Taliban government as leverage, demanding secure airfields and safe passage for Afghans whom the Americans wanted to bring out with them,” he added.
Instead, it reportedly “studied the problem in endless meetings.”
For his part, Biden has argued that there was not a way to withdraw from Afghanistan “without chaos ensuing.” And in a press conference last month, Biden said that he makes “no apologies for what I did” regarding the withdrawal.
