(FreedomBeacon.com)- It’s becoming very clear that the Biden administration was ill-prepared, to say the least, for the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Axios recently obtained a leaked document from a meeting of the National Security Council that shows how officials were still working on August 14 about how they’d organize the evacuation of Afghan citizens. The country’s capital eventually fell into the hands of the Taliban a day later, on August 15.
The document that Axios obtained was labeled “Summary of Conclusions for Meeting of the Deputies Small Group,” and included further labels for actions titled “Pre-departure” and “Post-departure.”
Notes Axios obtained show that the White House had just begun “planning transit processing for evacuees after departure from Kabul.”
Another point of the notes read:
“State will work to identify as many countries as possible to serve as transit points. Transit points need to be to accommodate U.S. citizens, Afghan nationals, third country nationals and other evacuees.”
The National Security Council had a meeting scheduled for August 15 “to address whether foreign nationals who are immediate family members of U.S. citizens in Afghanistan” would need more screening, or whether they’d be allowed to immediately come to the United States.
That issue became pressing — and botched — when the Taliban took control of Kabul that same day the meeting was scheduled for.
The notes continue:
“Embassy Kabul will notify LES [locally employed staff] to begin to register their interest in relocation to the United States and begin to prepare immediately for departure.”
These notes — and the timing of when the meetings were held, and when future meetings were scheduled — prove that the Biden administration was very much ill-prepared for what’s ahead. While it admittedly would have been difficult for any administration to predict that the Taliban would be successful as they were in taking over the country, and as quickly as they did.
That being said, the Biden administration knew from the outset that the U.S. was going to withdrawal all troops from the country. Why they waited until mid-August to get together and try to figure out the plan is what is most shocking.
The full withdrawal has been labeled by many — on both sides of the political aisle — as chaotic. Many conservatives continue to use it as a point of attack on the Biden administration, and on Democrats in general.
The administration left thousands of allies from Afghanistan behind in the country, where they are very susceptible for being attacked as retaliation for working for the U.S. over the last 20 years.
In a statement released this week, the NSC said they were “not going to comment on leaked internal documents. Cherry-picked notes from one meeting do not reflect the months of work that were already underway.”
It added:
“Earlier that summer, we launched Operation Allies Refuge and had worked with Congress to pass legislation that gave us greater flexibility to quickly relocate Afghan partners. It was because of this type of planning and other efforts that we were able to facilitate the evacuation of more than 120,000 Americans, legal permanent residents, vulnerable Afghans and other partners.”
