White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Friday dismissed concerns voiced by Representative Susan Wild that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan had been “egregiously mishandled,” arguing that it is “easy to throw stones” from the outside.
“Although it is clear to me that we could not continue to put American servicemembers in danger for an unwinnable war, I also believe that the evacuation process appears to have been egregiously mishandled,” Wild wrote in a tweet on Thursday after a bombing at the Kabul airport killed 13 American soldiers and dozens of Afghan civilians.
Asked about Wild’s comments during a press briefing on Friday, Psaki said while she does not have a “direct response to any member of Congress” that “it is easy to throw stones or be a critic from the outside.”
“It is harder to be in the arena and make difficult decisions and the decision that a commander-in-chief has to make include among difficult options,” she said.
She went on to create a false dichotomy, saying President Biden was faced with two choices: sending tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan “to potentially lose their lives” or to pull out and not put anyone at risk by not working to evacuate Americans and Afghans.
“He has chosen in coordination and based on the recommendation of military commanders and advisors on the ground to implement an evacuation that has saved the lives potentially of more than 105,000 people certainly at risk of the men and women who are serving in the military, as we saw by the events of yesterday,” she said.
Psaki then had a tense exchange with a reporter who pushed back, noting that she has repeatedly painted a false picture of the situation in listing only two choices. The reporter asked “what evidence” Psaki has that there were no other choices that could have been made.
“Well, what’s the other choice that anyone is offering?” Psaki shot back.
After the reporter responded that the administration could have begun the evacuation in May, among a host of other choices, Psaki acknowledged that there are “of course other options.”
She argued that if the evacuation had begun in May that “in all likelihood, the threat on U.S. forces would have increased at that time.”
The reporter pushed back, saying the U.S. would have at least been operating in a capital that wasn’t “overrun by the Taliban.”
After additional back and forth, Psaki finally said she thinks it is “easy to play a backseat” with hindsight and acknowledged that “no one anticipated” that the Afghan government would have fallen so quickly.
The Biden administration has continued to deflect blame for the chaos in Afghanistan, sidestepping questions about how the evacuation could have been better handled.
Biden chose to withdraw American forces at the height of fighting season amid a gathering Taliban offensive. The U.S. military left Bagram Airfield last month without informing its new Afghan commander and before extracting all U.S. civilians and Afghan special immigrant visa applicants. Afghan forces were left without any substitute for U.S. air support or the American contractors who serviced the planes they were left by the U.S.
Later on Friday, Psaki defended the United States’s decision to shut down Bagram, saying it “required an enormous presence” and was a “significant distance” from Kabul and therefore would not have been effective in evacuating people who are located in the capital.
However, the Taliban took over the Bagram Air Base prison as it conquered cities and provinces across Afghanistan and subsequently released “thousands” of ISIS-K prisoners into the country, according to Pentagon press secretary John Kirby.
The prison had held roughly 5,000 inmates of both Taliban and Islamic State group affiliation, Associated Press previously reported. It is believed that the perpetrators of Thursday’s airport attack likely came from the group of released prisoners.
Source: National Review
