Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team is drawing new criticism for mismanaging the evacuation from Afghanistan, and this time, the call is coming from inside the house.
“There was a general consensus that Kabul would fall and it would fall across the backs of the people who were closest to the United States the hardest. And it was inevitably going to lead to panic,” a State Department official told Politico. "So I don’t think it was an intelligence failure. I think it was a management failure.”
That rebuke amplifies the criticism that Blinken has faced on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers in both parties have rejected the Biden administration’s claim that intelligence officials failed to anticipate the Taliban’s rapid victory. The chaotic August evacuation left many State Department officials struggling with their inability to help desperate Afghan colleagues.
Blinken’s team, meanwhile, worries that Americans caught in Ethiopia’s civil war may see the Afghanistan evacuation as a model for their own escape.
