Jake Tapper led a CNN panel that sharply criticized President Joe Biden ‘s Monday remarks about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and f...
Jake Tapper led a CNN panel that sharply criticized President Joe Biden‘s Monday remarks about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and failure to answer questions about how it has unfolded.
Fareed Zakaria kicked off the discussion by largely defending Biden, saying Biden’s point that the U.S. had made little headway in defeating the Taliban “will ring true” to many Americans. However, he then acknowledged “that it is possible there was a better way to get out.”
“But as I’ve said, Jake, at the end of the day, the problem is we lost this war several years ago,” Zakaria said. “We have not been able to defeat the Taliban. Biden did pull the band-aid off. And I think he took a very tough decision, a brave decision, and maybe at the end of the day, there is no elegant way to lose a war.”
Kaitlan Collins then commented from the White House that Biden’s speech did not explain “how the withdrawal happened.”
Collins said reports and images from Kabul, including those of “desperate Afghans clinging to U.S. planes as they are taking off from the tarmac” are raising questions to “the White House over misjudging the intelligence.”
“Because President Biden did concede six weeks after saying he thought a Taliban takeover was highly unlikely, that it happened a lot faster than they expected,” she said. “But the questions behind that are whether or not he was warned that this could happen, whether or not the U.S. Intelligence did believe that was a possibility. And if they were preparing for every possibility, why was this not included in it?”
Tapper compared the images of the people falling from U.S. planes in Kabul to that of The Falling Man images from September 11, adding that Biden’s speech had a lot of “finger pointing” in it.
“You said before the address that you thought that you wanted to hear President Biden accept responsibility for the catastrophe we’ve been watching take place in Afghanistan,” Tapper told David Axelrod. “Afghans desperate, running onto the tarmac, grabbing onto the wheels of U.S. Air Force planes, falling from those planes almost like a cruel and tragic bookend to the Falling Man images that we saw on 9/11. He did say the buck stops with me. But I heard a lot of finger-pointing.”
Axelrod agreed that he thought the withdrawal was necessary, but that Biden “needed to take responsibility” for what is happening in Afghanistan.
“My thoughts go back to President Kennedy in the Bay of Pigs crisis when that was a failure. He stood before the American people and he said, ‘Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan. I am the responsible officer of government,'” Axelrod said. “And I think a little more of that would’ve been useful for the president here.”
“We’re going to continue to see horrific scenes for some time to come here, and this clearly did not go as planned,” Axelrod continued. “And to pretend that it did go as planned, I mean, he did say in passing that this was not — that it went faster than they thought it would. Well, that’s like a pretty big fact.”
Tapper than asked Dana Bash whether Biden’s speech would “go over well” with Americans who are “weary of war.”
Bash said it would, and that the address “was about was telling the American people, this is why I stand by my decision, this is a reminder that I am the fourth president to preside over the war in Afghanistan, and I won’t allow there to be a fifth.”
“Having said all that, he didn’t answer really important questions,” she added. “For example… if this was very long in the planning, why wasn’t it executed properly? Why wasn’t the American military ready for this? Why didn’t the people who wanted visas… why weren’t they brought out a long time ago, since we knew this deadline was going to happen?”
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