Chuck Todd Presses Blinken Over June Comments About Afghanistan Withdrawal: ‘That Does Not Age Well’

Chuck Todd confronted Secretary of State Antony Blinken with what he was publicly saying mere weeks ago about Afghanistan.

President Ashraf Ghani has fled the country and as of this posting Taliban forces are in Kabul. The fact that Afghanistan is falling so quickly recalls what President Joe Biden said last month about it being “highly unlikely” that the Taliban will be “overrunning everything and owning the whole country.”

The Secretary of State himself said this in June:

I don’t think it’s going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday. So I wouldn’t necessarily equate the departure of our forces in July, August, or by early September with some kind of immediate deterioration in the situation.

“How did that assessment end up so wrong?” Todd asked. “Is that an intelligence assessment that went wrong? Is that a Pentagon assessment that went wrong? Your own? That does not age well.”

Blinken claimed they’ve “known all along” the Taliban “was at its strongest position” since 2001, but added, “The inability of Afghan security forces to defend their country has played a very powerful role in what we’ve seen over the last few weeks.”

Todd questioned Blinken on the “absence of contingency planning,” as one retired general put it, given how the U.S. is currently in the process of working to evacuate U.S. embassy staffers while the Taliban is at the capital.

“We had two presidents that were pretty insistent we were going to get out,” Todd said. “This looks like a chaotic withdrawal for something that politically seemed inevitable to the American people. What happened there?”

Blinken said they “began an ordered departure” from the embassy at the end of April, and “as facts have changed, we’ve adjusted to that.”

You can watch above, via NBC.