Biden officials admit miscalculation as Afghanistan’s national forces and government rapidly fall
President Joe Biden and his administration struggled Sunday to project order amid a race by American and other foreign personnel to evacuate Afghanistan as Taliban fighters entered Kabul.
The rapid fall of Afghanistan’s national forces and government has come as a shock to Biden and senior members of his administration, who only last month believed it could take months before the civilian government in Kabul fell – allowing a period of time after American troops left before the full consequences of the withdrawal were laid bare.
Now, officials are frankly admitting they miscalculated.
“The fact of the matter is we’ve seen that that force has been unable to defend the country,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union,” referring to Afghanistan’s national security forces. “And that has happened more quickly than we anticipated.”
The risks for Biden politically are uncertain; a majority of Americans say in polls they support withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, and Biden’s aides have calculated the country shares his weariness at prolonging a 20-year conflict.
Yet the chaotic scenes playing out as that war ends – evoking the fall of Saigon in 1975, an image that haunted Biden as he weighed a withdrawal earlier this year – are certain to trail Biden as the Taliban asserts control over large swaths of the country.
Already, some members of Congress are demanding more information from the administration on how its intelligence could have so badly misjudged the situation on the ground, or why more robust contingency plans for evacuating Americans and their allies weren’t in place. .................
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