Rice, who said she disagreed with the decision to pull out troops from the region, slammed President Joe Biden for basic flaws in the withdrawal.
“I think the real issue here is that, even if one believed that it was time to withdraw –which I actually don’t believe it was time to withdraw — but if one believed that it was time to withdraw, this could have been done in a more orderly fashion,” Rice told Shapiro. “For instance, we know that the Taliban don’t fight in the winter; there is a fighting season in Afghanistan. It would have been perfectly logical to wait until they had gone back into the mountains of Pakistan.”
“I think it would have been wise to hang on to Bagram [airbase] — maybe even some of our other seven airfields that we had there, so that transport of people out could have been slower, more orderly, could have taken place from more secure locations,” she continued.
“I’ve been to Hamid Karzai International Airport,” Rice noted, “it’s not a place that you would want to try and secure. … I think that there were ways to do this in a fashion that wouldn’t have seen the precipitous fall of Kabul, and where we wouldn’t have had the kind of chaos that we had at the airport.”
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