Biden Ignored Blinken and Austin Advice to ‘Slow Down the Process’ on Afghanistan Withdrawal Says Bob Woodward
According to Bob Woodward, President Joe Biden ignored specific and formal advice presented by his Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to “slow down the process” of withdrawing US military troops from Afghanistan.
Woodward appeared on Morning Joe alongside co-author Robert Costa in their first tv appearance to promote their new book Peril, which documents the final days of former President Donald Trump’s days in the White House and the transition to the earliest days of the Biden administration.
The raft of headlines that have emerged from Peril has focused on Trump’s curious and pernicious behavior in trying to stop the peaceful transition of power to Biden, Woodward, and Costa also addressed many of the challenges Biden faced.
AP White House reporter Jonathan Lemire sat with Woodward and Costa in a DC studio and asked what Biden inherited from the Trump administration. Woodward first praised Biden’s preparation for dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, particularly his Chief of Staff Ron Klain’s experience from his time as Ebola Czar under President Obama.
He then pivoted to Afghanistan and revealed Biden’s apparent stubbornness on how to remove troops likely did not serve him well, saying:
There’s a lot of reporting we did and Afghanistan and the pull out that Biden was insisting that ‘we got to get out now and it turns out March of this year, Biden’s top cabinet officers Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State and Lloyd Austin, the Defense Secretary, proposed formally in all of these discussions to slow down the process. Austin, particularly says, ‘gate the withdrawal. A few here, a few now, don’t do it in one sweep,’ and you now look back at that, and that probably was good advice that was not taken.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan was so messy that it quickly evolved into an evacuation. While an improvised airlift successfully removed over 100,000 individuals from the war-torn nation in roughly two weeks, how it unfolded was a big and bipartisan political hit for the Biden administration.
Watch above via MSNBC.
