- The notion the civilian government led by former President Ashraf Ghani would be unable to withstand the Taliban’s advances is not a surprise.
President Joe Biden and his administration struggled on Sunday to project order amid a race by American and other foreign personnel to evacuate Afghanistan as Taliban fighters entered Kabul, CNN said on Monday.
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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.
Credit: AP
US has sent 1,000 more troops to make 6,000 for evacuation of personnel in which priority is given to Americans before Afghan officials which were promised air-lifting.
Now, months after his initial declaration that all 2,500 US troops would be out of Afghanistan by the end of the summer, a total of 6,000 troops are expected to help facilitate the evacuation.
And 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, referring to Afghanistan’s national security forces. “And that has happened more quickly than we anticipated.”
Biden is expected to address the nation in the next few days about the crisis in Afghanistan, according to a senior administration official, though a final decision on a speech hadn’t been made and the President hasn’t yet cut short his summer vacation visit to Camp David.
One option under discussion is to have Biden return to the White House, though the official cautioned that they had not completely ruled out making the remarks from the presidential retreat, where he was photographed on Sunday receiving a briefing from his national security team. In the photo, Biden appeared alone wearing a polo shirt in front of a large bank of monitors.
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.
A White House official told CNN on Sunday that the President “has spoken to members of his national security team on the situation in Afghanistan and will continue to receive updates and be briefed throughout the day.”
“He is deeply engaged from Camp David,” one senior administration official said, who did not rule out the President returning to the White House.
The notion the civilian government led by former President Ashraf Ghani would be unable to withstand the Taliban’s advances is not a surprise. Intelligence assessments over the past year have offered differing timetables for what was viewed by many national security officials as an inevitability.
Biden himself has said repeatedly over the last months, including when Ghani visited him in the Oval Office this summer, that Afghanistan’s leaders would need to reconcile their differences if they had any hope of maintaining power.