Anyone who was watching the news last August during the disastrous American pullout from Afghanistan could see that calling the Biden administration “woefully unprepared” was probably the most charitable thing to say about them. Despite how obvious that should have been, a leaked set of notes from a Situation Room meeting on August 14th obtained by Axios demonstrates how completely unprepared the White House was for the sweeping takeover of the country by the Taliban. The meeting took place just one day before the entire nation was effectively overrun and the notes make it obvious that even some of the most fundamental decisions about how to organize the logistics of an evacuation had not been made. Is it any wonder that the pullout quickly turned into such a debacle? (NY Post)

Leaked documents allegedly show the White House wasn’t prepared to evacuate Afghanistan citizens just hours before the Taliban took control of the country’s capital.

Notes of a Situation Room meeting obtained by Axios show Biden administration officials scrambled at the last minute to solidify a plan as Taliban forces swiftly seized power in the country during a US withdrawal.

A National Security Council summary of conclusions on “Relocations out of Afghanistan” shows the outcome of an Aug. 14, 2021 meeting of aides to top administration officials as they tried to outline key exit-plan details one day before the Taliban took control of Kabul, Axios reported.

Kudos to Axios for having the temerity to track down and release this information. Normally, leaks to the press from inside the Biden administration are few and far between, with much of the mainstream media having little appetite to ask questions that might cast the Democratic President in a bad light. I hope the rest of the reporters out there are taking notes because this is what used to be known as “journalism.”

The details in the notes are alarming. With barely 24 hours to go, the State Department was being told to “work to identify as many countries as possible to serve as transit points” that would be able to accommodate American citizens, Afghan nationals, third-country nationals, and other evacuees. That instruction was helpfully tagged with a boldface command reading, “Action: State, immediately.”

In other words, as the Taliban forces were approaching Kabul, the White House not only had no way to get thousands of people out of the country but hadn’t even identified the destinations they would be scrambling to send them to. The officials in charge of our embassy in Kabul were told to inform locally employed workers to “begin to register their interest” in relocating to the United States if they wished to do so. So despite what the White House public relations arm was telling us at the time, there was no list of Afghan helpers and employees requiring relocation as part of the withdrawal. Those helpers weren’t even asked if they would like to leave until the day before the city fell.

It seems obvious now that Joe Biden must have still believed that the Afghan government and military would hold up well into the next year right up until the collapse. And keep in mind that the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction in the Department of Defense had warned the Biden administration more than eight months before then that the Afghan Air Force would “collapse” almost immediately if we left. (Followed quickly by the rest of the military.)

The meeting was chaired by someone from the National Security Council. When asked for comment, their spokesperson claimed that the notes from that meeting were “not reflective” of the “months of planning” that went into the evacuation. But the specifics listed in the meeting notes, along with the chaos unfolding in the streets of Kabul tell us otherwise. This remains one of the greatest military blunders of the current era and we are still paying a price for it to this day.