CNN host Jake Tapper said during Wednesday’s broadcast of “The Lead” that President Joe Biden was happy to talk about the decision to leave Afghanistan but not the manner in which that had been accomplished.
“Our crews on the ground reported absolute madness by the Taliban, gunshots fired into the air. Is there any sense of any kind of organized effort right now at the airport to prioritize getting Americans out of Afghanistan, getting these Afghans who are in the pipeline for these Special Immigrant Visas out of Afghanistan?” Tapper asked. (RELATED: Editor Daily Rundown: Biden Relies On The Taliban For The ‘Safe Passage’ Of American Citizens)
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“What we’re watching is the State Department try and apply some sort of organization to a situation that is frankly totally lost control right now,” CNN national security correspondent Kylie Atwood responded. She continued by saying that helping the Afghan allies get out Afghanistan was not a plan designed to work under the chaotic circumstances they were in.
Atwood then said that the main issue was getting people to the airport, and that although she had heard reports that the Taliban was not allowing people through checkpoints to get to the airport, she said that no American citizens had reported such problems.
“President Biden — we’ve been talking about this now for several days. He wants to talk about the decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan more than he wants to talk about how this withdrawal has gone, how inept the exit has been,” Tapper concluded. “He’s basically told Stephanopoulos all this was baked into the decision. He said the jury’s still out but the likelihood the Taliban is going to be running the whole country is highly unlikely. That was last month.”