Yahoo
The White House refused to draw further attention to reports President Joe Biden and ousted Afghan President Ashraf Ghani were unprepared for Afghanistan’s quick collapse and that Biden had encouraged his counterpart in Kabul, Afghanistan, to fix his “perception” problem by selling a military strategy with local political heavyweights.
Biden also challenged Ghani to “project a different picture” than that of a failing war effort against the Taliban, “whether it is true or not.”
Press secretary Jen Psaki declined to comment on “private diplomatic conversations or leaked transcripts of phone calls” on Wednesday.
“Our national security team and no one in Congress, or I would say most people out in the public, anticipated that the Taliban would be able to take over the country as quickly as they did or that the Afghan National Security Forces would fall as quickly as they did,” she said. “So even the content of the reporting is consistent with what we’ve said many times publicly.”
But Psaki qualified her comments on Wednesday, adding that there may have been “individuals in agencies” who had warned of the worst case scenario. A day earlier, she contended there were no dissenters “anywhere in the world.”
“They needed to come together in a cohesive manner. They needed to be united. They needed to show the country and the Afghan people they were going to fight and they were going to lead this transition, even as U.S. forces left,” she said Wednesday.
Biden did not entertain questions about the report earlier Wednesday when asked before his meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Oval Office.
