President Joe Biden has tried to portray himself as the paragon of transparency and competence. Once again, courtesy of a review by the State Department, his botched Afghanistan withdrawal debunks that narrative.
The State Department’s review of the withdrawal and evacuations that followed contradicts several of Biden and his administration’s defiant defenses of the withdrawal. Take, for example, this from Biden’s Aug. 31, 2021, remarks: “Since March, we reached out 19 times to Americans in Afghanistan, with multiple warnings and offers to help them leave Afghanistan — all the way back as far as March.” Biden essentially blamed the Americans he stranded in Afghanistan for not listening to his supposedly consistent warnings to leave.
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This was a ludicrous assertion at the time, given that Biden was also saying that the Taliban wouldn’t take over the country and that Afghanistan would be fine. The State Department’s report reaffirms the absurdity: "Constantly changing policy guidance and public messaging from Washington” about who could be relocated from Afghanistan “added to the confusion and often failed to take into account key facts on the ground.”
Biden said his administration “planned for every contingency” when it came to the withdrawal. The State Department’s report says that top officials gave “insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios and how quickly those might follow.” The report lays out a series of errors that made the withdrawal more chaotic, including locking down the embassy in Kabul due to COVID (making it harder for embassy staff to receive classified briefings) and attempting to rotate embassy personnel as Kabul was being conquered by the Taliban.
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That would very clearly contradict National Security Council spokesman John Kirby’s “I just don’t buy the whole argument of chaos” line. Then again, you would think that letting the Taliban run security in Kabul during the evacuation, leading to a suicide bomber killing 13 U.S. service members, would have already debunked that. Or Biden retaliating for that attack by drone-striking an aid worker he thought was a terrorist, killing seven children in the process. Or Kirby’s own comments during the withdrawal, in which he noted the “physical crush and chaos.”
In other words, Biden and his team botched the withdrawal every step of the way, and even his weak defenses and deflections have now been disputed by his own State Department. The withdrawal was a spectacular display of incompetence from beginning to end, no matter how Biden tries to spin it. He owns this failure because stunning incompetence is the defining feature of who Biden has always been.