It was perhaps inevitable that a chronically mismanaged 20-year war would not end tidily. But the United States withdrawal from Afghanistan has been inexcusably chaotic—a mad scramble to close the American embassy in Kabul and evacuate personnel and thousands of Afghan allies as the Taliban assumes control of the collapsed country. And yet, even as everything he said wouldn’t happen unfolds, President Joe Biden is insisting that there’s nothing he could have, or would have, done differently.
“You don’t think this could’ve been handled, this exit could’ve been handled in a better way?” George Stephanopoulos asked Biden in a Good Morning America interview Thursday. “No mistakes?”
“No,” the president replied. “I don’t think it could’ve been handled in a way that there — we’re gonna go back in hindsight and look, but the idea that somehow there’s a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don’t know how that happens. I don’t know how that happens.”
Biden has stuck to a defiant posture in recent days, as members of both parties criticize his handling of the Afghanistan exit. But much of his defense has been centered on his more hawkish detractors, who would have prolonged the U.S. presence in the country indefinitely. “There is no good time to leave Afghanistan,” he told Stephanopoulos. “Fifteen years ago would’ve been a problem, fifteen years from now. The basic choice is, am I gonna send your sons and your daughters to war in Afghanistan in perpetuity?”
Even many of his critics would side with him there—that never-ending war was unacceptable, and that concluding it was always going to be messy. But he has so far failed to fully address criticism from those who support withdrawal but who feel it was poorly executed, especially considering he and his administration had ample warning from the intelligence community about a Taliban takeover if the U.S. was not there to serve as a backstop for the Afghan government and military. On GMA, Biden maintained that “there was no consensus” among intelligence officials about what would happen upon a U.S. exit. “The idea that the Taliban would take over was premised on the notion that...somehow, the 300,000 troops we trained and equipped was gonna just collapse, they were just gonna give up,” Biden said. “I don’t think anybody anticipated that.”
To be sure, Biden has been handed a very challenging situation: The withdrawal was based on a timeline handed to him by his predecessor, Donald Trump, and his administration was already dealing with a backlog of Special Immigrant Visas from Afghanistan before the country’s rapid descent into Taliban rule, as Axios reported Wednesday. But his administration has also sent mixed signals about its ability now to rescue Afghan allies and those now vulnerable to Taliban rule: Biden on Thursday said he was committed to “get everyone out that, in fact, we can get out and everyone that should come out,” but Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said a day earlier that might not be possible. “We don’t have the capability to go out and collect large numbers of people,” he told reporters Wednesday. That’s devastating: Reports indicate that the administration failed to be proactive in helping the Afghans who could soon be left exposed by the U.S. withdrawal. They’re scrambling now, and Biden did promise Thursday to leave troops on the ground as long as it took to finish evacuating Americans—but it’s unclear if that vow extends to Afghan allies. “There was a very proactive campaign from outside groups trying to help, and we were stiff-armed,” James Miervaldis, chairman of the nonprofit No One Left Behind, told the Washington Post. “All we asked for was a plan. Whatever they wanted to do, we were standing by to support. But then they didn’t do anything [right away].”
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Joe Biden Has No Regrets About Messy Afghanistan Exit - Vanity Fair
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