On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Hallie Jackson Reports,” Home Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-WA) said “the Biden administration didn’t listen to the intelligence more thoroughly and didn’t plan better” for the withdrawal from Afghanistan, “and we’re now seeing the outcome of that.” He included, “the preparation could have been much better. And I don’t think anybody can objectively take a look at that and reach a various conclusion.”
Smith started by saying, “The choice to leave Afghanistan, I think, makes sense for a lot of the factors that President Biden has actually said. And to some degree, the fast collapse of the Afghan National Security Forces and the Afghan government sort of makes the point that we could have stayed another year, another five, another 10, another fifteen, and the outcome wouldn’t have actually been various.”
He continued, “The thing that’s actually uncomfortable is that the Biden administration didn’t listen to the intelligence more carefully and didn’t plan much better. I indicate, when we first began doing hearings on the expected decision of the Biden administration to withdraw from Afghanistan in January and February, lots of members on our committee, including me, asked the Pentagon what their strategy was to get our advocates out of Afghanistan. And the initial answers that we received from the Pentagon were, well, the State Department is managing that. We were like, okay, however it’s a security thing. They’re going to need you. And we truly didn’t get excellent responses. Now, as you know, we in Congress have been pushing from that time. We passed a number of pieces of legislation to increase the number of visas. We have been promoting that plan. And unfortunately, that’s what was missing from this withdrawal plan, was to ensure that our security forces existed to protect the people that we needed to go out. … So, they did not listen to the intelligence as much as they need to have, and they didn’t plan as much for getting the civilians out as they should have. That’s the bottom line, and we’re now seeing the result of that.”
Later, Smith saw a clip of Biden stating that there was no way to leave Afghanistan without chaos resulting. Smith reacted, “I think it is definitely real that it was never going to be easy and it was never going to be painless. I think the president’s ideal about that. However where I think he’s wrong is I believe we might have planned better for how we were going to withdraw the residents from Afghanistan that we wished to. And I think in the February, March, April timeframe when we were getting ready for this withdrawal, we could have done more to start the procedure of getting those folks out faster. I believe it might have been less chaotic, and I think it’s perfectly the ideal thing to do to judge that and say, look, we need to gain from this, we need to learn about the error that was made and not paper over it. The president’s right that this wasn’t going to be easy. It wasn’t going to be clean. There was clearly going to be problem and a great deal of difficult situations. But I think the preparation might have been much better. And I don’t think anyone can objectively take a look at that and reach a different conclusion.”
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