Secretary of Antony Blinken acknowledged in Senate testimony on Tuesday that the Biden administration failed to anticipate Afghanistan collapsing as quickly as it did.
He made the admission under grilling from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who asked what the administration’s view of the matter was leading up to the United States’ August withdrawal. “The Afghan government was still fractious and corrupt, and the Taliban [had] unchallenged safe haven in Pakistan,” Rubio noted. “Paraphrasing your own words — if, after 20 years and hundreds of billions of dollars in support, equipment, and training, there is not enough for the Afghan government or the Afghan security forces to become more resilient or self-sustaining, what did we think was going to happen as that support began to be removed?”
Blinken said officials were aware of the “deteriorating” situation as the Taliban “continued to make progress on the ground,” and that by July, the intelligence community “indicated it was more likely than not that the Taliban would take over by the end of the year.”
“That said, we — the intelligence community did not see that the country-wide collapse of all meaningful resistance would be likely to occur in a matter of days,” he added, before invoking Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley. “Nothing that he or I or we saw suggested this government and security forces would collapse in a matter of 11 days.
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