Blinken rejects Pentagon responsibility for Afghan chaos

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken gestures to researchers working in biocontainment laboratories for highly infectious pathogens as he is escorted by Paul Duprex, PhD, director of the Vaccine Research Center at the University of Pittsburgh, during a tour of the University of Pittsburgh’s biomedical research facilities, Thursday, September 30, 2021 in Pittsburgh. (AP Photo / Rebecca Droke, Pool) Rebecca Droke / AP

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has dismissed the Pentagon’s suggestion that the State Department was solely responsible for the delay in the withdrawal from Afghanistan as the blame game for Kabul’s chaos erupts in the public eye.

I don’t think anyone can say that we made any of the decisions that we made alone an agency making the decision, Blinken said Thursday during a trip to Pittsburgh. We did it together.

President Joe Bidens’ national security team attempted to maintain a semblance of unity throughout his first year in office, but their discipline was tested by Afghanistan and the backlash from Congress which has regular. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, in the spotlight in a pair of high-profile hearings this week, have suggested Defense Department officials are being more foresight than their diplomatic counterparts.

We started thinking about the possibilities of evacuating non-combatants as early as this spring, Austin told the Senate Armed Services Committee. As for when we started the evacuations, we offered to help the State contribute to the State Department’s decision, aware of their concerns that moving too early could in fact cause the very collapse of the State Department. Afghan government that we all wanted to avoid and that moving too late would put our people and our operations at greater risk. And as I said, the fact that our troops are on the ground so quickly is due in large part to our planning and pre-positioning of forces.

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Milley was more adamant in a subsequent confidential hearing, saying Blinkens’ team of lawmakers had waited too long “to initiate the evacuation operation, according to Axios. The timing of this effort, in conjunction with the Taliban’s conquest of all major Afghan cities within 11 days in August, left US forces in the dangerous position of trying to extract Western officials and diplomats from Kabul under the gaze of Taliban militants and attacks imminent branch of the Islamic States in Afghanistan.

Non-combatant evacuations remain among the most difficult military operations, even under the best of circumstances, Austin said. And the circumstances in August were anything but ideal.

Blinken acknowledged the difficulties that beset the evacuation effort, which allowed an estimated 125,000 people to escape the country, but left dozens of American citizens and the majority of Afghans who associated with the States- United during the war. But he tried to lower the curtain on all internal disputes.

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As Joint Chiefs Chairman General Milley himself put it: No one expected the Afghan security forces, as well as the government, to collapse in the short time they did, Blinken said. Everything we have done, we have done collectively, as a team, through a process. And, every voice has been heard and listened to in this process.

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Tags: News, Foreign Policy, National Security, Antony Blinken, Mark Milley, Lloyd Austin, Afghanistan, Senate Armed Services Committee

Original author: Joel Gehrke

Place of Origin: We Did It Together: Blinken Blames Pentagon for Chaos in Afghanistan

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