As the Taliban blitz across Afghanistan and U.S. officials scramble to assess just how quickly the government in Kabul could fall, President Joe Biden is recalibrating his message to Americans.
Where he once insisted that two decades of U.S. backing had left Afghan forces capable of defending themselves, Biden and his aides have shifted to a more cold-blooded mantra: If they can't, that's not our problem.
Inside the administration, top aides are just trying to keep up with the rapidly changing battlefield. U.S. officials now believe Kabul could be surrounded or fall under Taliban control within weeks, and even the future of the fortress-like U.S. Embassy is increasingly in doubt.
The president, meanwhile, is holding firm to last spring's decision to withdraw U.S. combat troops, calculating that war-weary voters would rather tune out the alarming developments in a conflict they've largely ignored.
"I do not regret my decision," Biden told reporters Tuesday, after pointing out that the U.S. has spent more than a trillion dollars and lost thousands of its own troops to train and equip Afghanistan's military.
"Afghan leaders have to come together," he said. "They've got to fight for themselves, fight for their nation."
"No one should pretend they're surprised the Taliban is winning now that we abandoned our Afghan partners," Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska said in a statement. "No one should pretend to be surprised when girls and women are brutalized. And no one should pretend to be surprised when the Taliban yet again provides safe harbor to terrorists plotting international attacks."
Some of the latest reports say the Taliban control 65 percent of Afghan territory already. The Islamist militia, whose oppressive, misogynistic rule in the 1990s is still fresh in the minds of many Afghans, has recently captured several provincial capitals.
Those cities include Kunduz, a prize that tightened the Taliban's grip on Afghanistan's north. The militants have traditionally had their power base in the south, and their northern advances have alarmed Afghan leaders.
Videos posted online Wednesday showed Taliban fighters driving captured Humvees through Kunduz and posing next to an Mi-24 helicopter gunship at the airfield there after hundreds of Afghan troops fled, in another embarrassing blow for the government.
A new U.S. military assessment says the national capital, Kabul, could fall to the Taliban in as quickly as a month, a person familiar with the intelligence told POLITICO. The person added that capturing the whole city could take longer, six months or more, and that the situation is "fluid."
Details of the assessment, which included analysis from multiple military and intelligence units, were first reported by The Washington Post.
According to three people knowledgeable about the situation, internal administration discussions have broached evacuating the U.S. Embassy in Kabul as a possibility; one person said the mission could be emptied by the end of this month.
Biden on Afghanistan: Not my problem
The president is unwilling to rethink his decision to withdraw U.S. troops, even as Afghanistan unravels faster than expected.
www.politico.com
