Criticism of Biden for his measures in Afghanistan 1:01
(CNN) -
When images of desperate Afghans clinging to American fighter jets began to emerge from Kabul on Monday morning, US President Joe Biden had admitted to his aides that he had no choice but to interrupt their stay. at Camp David to return to the White House.
Biden had been facing calls, even from his political allies, to discuss Afghanistan's fall to the Taliban.
His top aides had begun to publicly admit that the speed with which the Afghan army would collapse took them by surprise.
But they wanted the situation in Kabul to stabilize before Biden addressed the nation.
And his own words earlier this summer, describing a Taliban takeover as "unlikely," were compounding the feeling that a commander-in-chief was caught off guard.
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During briefings, the president questioned his team about how they might have miscalculated the time it would take for the Afghan army to collapse, according to people familiar with the matter.
He has also expressed dismay at the failure of Ashraf Ghani, the ousted Afghan president who fled the country on Sunday, to adhere to a plan he presented in the Oval Office in June to prevent the Taliban from taking over major cities.
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Throughout the weekend, Biden remained at the presidential retirement residence, receiving reports while sitting alone at the conference table.
The advisers met separately to discuss when and how the situation should be addressed.
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When he returned to the White House at noon on Monday, many of his aides assumed he would at least spend the night there.
However, almost as soon as Biden landed in Washington, word spread that his stay at the executive mansion would be brief.
After his 18-minute speech, Biden quickly returned to the mountains.
Biden's speech
As aides worked feverishly Monday to gauge the president's speech, there was far less concern about predictable criticism from Republicans than about how Biden's own words and calculations over the past few months had been so wrong.
Biden: The mission was not to create another nation in Afghanistan 1:11
The three-day stretch highlighted two of Biden's most pronounced political traits: a stubborn defensive streak and fierce certainty in his decision-making, which leaves little room for a second opinion.
Those traits led to an air of defiance looming over the White House on Monday.
But the shocking images of the chaos in Kabul, which the president called "heartbreaking", stood as irrefutable evidence of failure.
Deciding what to do next was up to Biden.
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Within the White House and national security agencies, there has been an intense debate about how the current catastrophe in Afghanistan unfolded.
Officials who have built entire careers on issues related to the country have found it difficult to comprehend the forceful end of the 20-year conflict.
Never in the seven months of Biden's presidency has the administration's competence been so intensely questioned, and the president's defiant and defensive speech on Monday only fueled concerns rather than allayed them.
Was Joe Biden's decision on Afghanistan correct?
0:53
A senior White House official told CNN a day after the speech that "there is no question about the president's strategy."
But he acknowledged that much more had to be done to explain how the crisis escalated and how the government was caught off guard by the Taliban's rise in power.
Still, the official emphasized that the administration was focused "on looking forward, not back."
"Yes, our competition is being questioned," the official added.
"The only way to fix that is to stabilize the airport and safely remove the Americans and our partners to the best of our ability."
OPINION |
The big gap in Biden's speech on Afghanistan
Biden's challenging message
The challenging message of Biden's speech Monday reflected the conversations he had with his advisers over the past 48 hours.
Officials knew that the situation that eventually developed was possible.
The Taliban crushed the civilian government in Kabul once the US forces left.
But they had counted on it to be unlikely.
Biden's top advisers have been candid this week in admitting they didn't expect it to happen so quickly.
"It is certainly the case that the rate at which cities fell was much greater than expected," national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on NBC's "Today" show on Monday.
At the same time, Biden has grappled with his own past statements, downplaying the idea that the Taliban would invade Kabul.
And flatly rejecting the possibility that the US embassy was evacuated.
Panic images of Afghans fleeing the Taliban 2:33
Avoid a crisis of confidence
Part of that approach, to minimize the possibility of the Taliban taking control of the country, was aimed at preventing further erosion of morale among the country's defense forces, an adviser said.
And Biden said during his remarks that the now-deposed Afghan government had encouraged the United States to postpone orchestrating a mass exodus "to avoid triggering, as they put it, a crisis of confidence."
Taliban leader congratulates the entire Afghan population after taking power in Kabul
Still, in hindsight, Biden's comments on how the war would end, including rejecting comparisons to the fall of Saigon in 1975, seemed wildly wrong.
"For the administration to say that this is not going to be Saigon while we look at those kinds of images, well, maybe they are right. Because they are much worse than Saigon," said Ryan Crocker, who served as ambassador to Afghanistan under the former president. Barack Obama.
Questions without answer
Biden has long exuded self-assurance, both in his foreign policy views and in his political strategy, honed during his many years in Washington.
Advisers say that while you welcome dissenting opinions and robust debate, you are more likely to abruptly close a conversation if you feel your knowledge of a situation, particularly on international affairs, is being questioned.
That stubbornness was fully evident in his speech from the East Room, during which the president spent much more time defending his decision to withdraw US troops than acknowledging the miscalculations admitted by his administration.
Biden: Maintain decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan 4:21
Although he briefly acknowledged that the Taliban's advance and the collapse of the government took place "faster than we anticipated," Biden made clear that his intention to end the war had not changed.
"I am the president of the United States," Biden said.
"The ball stops with me."
However, if that's really the case, Biden left a host of questions unanswered about how events got out of hand so quickly.
And he only said that the troop withdrawal process had been "tough and complicated."
Furthermore, he has shown no sign, publicly or, his aides say, privately, that he believes that his own decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan helped cause the current crisis.
ANALYSIS |
Desperate scenes reveal defeat in Afghanistan that Biden can't deny
"I know that my decision will be criticized"
Instead, he has blamed other participants in the conflict: the Afghan army, for falling apart;
former President Donald Trump, for accepting an agreement with the Taliban;
and his predecessors, for expanding a mission in a country without considering how to end it.
He also lashed out at Ghani, saying the Afghan leader "roundly rejected" Biden's advice on seeking a political settlement with the Taliban and was "wrong" about the strength of the Afghan army.
"I know that my decision will be criticized, but I would rather accept all those criticisms than pass this decision on to another president of the United States," he said in his speech.
As he left the East Room without answering questions from reporters, key members of Congress signaled their intention to get to the bottom of the crisis.
Airlines divert their flights from Afghanistan's airspace 0:54
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, Democratic Chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said he and other lawmakers had "tough but necessary questions about why we weren't better prepared for the worst-case scenario involving such a rapid and total collapse of the US. Afghan government and security forces. "
"We owe those responses to the American people," Warner said, "and to all those who served and sacrificed so much."
On Tuesday, the White House reached out to allies on Capitol Hill, and other allies, to explain its efforts and try to ease their concerns.
America's longest war
From the moment he walked into the Oval Office seven months ago, Biden was determined to see that his presidency would do what his three predecessors did not.
That is, to end America's longest war.
He surrounded himself with top advisers who shared that fundamental belief.
This, now, raises a question even among some Democrats as to whether their loyalty prevented them from taking seriously the warnings about the consequences of a swift withdrawal.
"No one disagrees with the decision to leave Afghanistan, literally almost no one," a former Obama national security official told CNN on Monday.
"But executing that decision was their responsibility and they were caught off guard."
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Few advisers in the White House are closer to Biden than Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Sullivan, who have worked for him for years.
They appeared on television this week to defend their boss's decision to end the war.
Other advisers, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, have spent less time in Biden's orbit.
When the president was weighing a decision on Afghanistan in the spring, Milley was among the loudest voices advocating a continued presence of US forces in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan: "The United States resigned leadership and lost a very important presence"
"This has been a disaster"
Biden rejected that view, even as the generals warned of the possibility of a Taliban takeover.
Whether it's a miscalculation, an intelligence flaw, or a combination of both, the president now faces a credibility crisis in one of his strongest calling cards: foreign policy.
"You cannot defend the execution here," said David Axelrod, a senior Obama adviser who was involved in deliberations on Afghanistan early in that administration.
"This has been a disaster. For everyone, anyone with a pounding heart, seeing these scenes of people desperately milling around the airport trying to get out before the anticipated massacre of the Taliban, you know, it's heartbreaking. It is depressing. And it's a failure. "
"You need to acknowledge that failure," said Axelrod, who is a high-level political commentator for CNN.
"He is the commander-in-chief."
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Support for Biden's decision
Officials say that what drives the president's thinking is the prevailing belief that, like him, most Americans are tired of the protracted conflict in Afghanistan.
His advisers in recent months have relied on the American public to support him in his decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan.
An ABC News / Ipsos poll in July found that 55% of American adults approved of the way Biden was handling retirement.
Hours after the capture of Kabul, these are the first measures of the Taliban in Afghanistan
In a May Quinnipiac University poll, 62% of American adults approved of Biden's decision to bring all US troops home from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021.
Some White House officials have also privately noted that, as the country continues to battle COVID-19 and the economy shrugs off the lingering effects of the pandemic, events unfolding thousands of miles away. distance are hardly at the forefront of American minds.
Afghanistan