A multitude of details continues to emerge giving insight into President Joe Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. A declassified special-inspector-general report “proves that the Pentagon and the Biden administration were warned in January 2021 that Afghanistan’s air force did not have the capabilities to survive after a U.S. withdrawal” reports National Review.
The report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko, submitted to the Department of Defense in January 2021, underscores that American authorities had been alerted that Afghanistan’s air force did not have the capabilities to survive after a U.S. withdrawal. In particular, the report points to U.S. failure to train Afghan support staff, leaving the air force unable to maintain its aircraft without American contractors.
National Review lays out a comprehensive timeline of what occurred after the warning in January of 2021, including Biden’s lies:
Six months later, President Biden went before the country and assured Americans that the Afghan military was up to the job of holding off the Taliban: “I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more re- — more competent in terms of conducting war.”
In fact, Biden specifically denied that the intelligence community was warning him about the fragility of the Afghan military and the government it supported:
Q: Mr. President, thank you very much. Your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse.
THE PRESIDENT: That is not true.
Q: Is it — can you please clarify what they have told you about whether that will happen or not?
THE PRESIDENT: That is not true. They did not — they didn’t — did not reach that conclusion.
And Biden infamously guaranteed that “The Taliban is not the South — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”
National Review concludes, “This was not a case of military and intelligence officials being blind and stupid and not recognizing the consequences of a course of action. Military and intelligence officials foresaw the likely consequences and warned the president. And the president chose to ignore them, convinced he knew better.”