White House Dodges on Bombshell Report That Taliban Offered U.S. Control of Kabul

O ver the weekend, the Washington Post published a bombshell report: The Taliban had offered to stay outside of Kabul the weekend of August 15 and let the U.S. military secure the city, but the Taliban’s offer was rejected by General Kenneth McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command, because President Biden only wanted U.S. troops to secure the Kabul airport.

When White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked at Monday’s press briefing if the report was accurate, she replied: “I have not seen this reporting. I have to look at it.”

Psaki’s response strains credulity. The story had been shared widely over the weekend, and White House chief of staff Ron Klain retweeted a tweet from the editor of Talking Points Memo that said: “We were right not to take over security in Kabul when the Taliban asked if we wanted to.”

So, was the United States right to reject the Taliban’s reported offer to stay outside of Kabul and let U.S. forces secure the city?

First, some more background on the Post’s bombshell report: On the evening of August 14, Secretary of State Antony Blinken asked Ashraf Ghani, then president of Afghanistan, to support “a U.S.-brokered arrangement with the Taliban in which the militants would remain outside Kabul if the Afghan leader would step aside as an interim government took charge.” According to one senior U.S. official, the aim was “to buy time for negotiations aimed at forming an inclusive government that involved the Taliban, as well as others.”

Ghani agreed, but then fled the country the next day, Sunday, August 15.

It’s worth quoting the Post report at length on what happened next:

In the void, law and order began to break down, with reports of armed gangs moving through the streets.

In a hastily arranged in-person meeting, senior U.S. military leaders in Doha — including McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command — spoke with Abdul Ghani Baradar, head of the Taliban’s political wing.

“We have a problem,” Baradar said, according to the U.S. official. “We have two options to deal with it: You [the United States military] take responsibility for securing Kabul or you have to allow us to do it.”

Throughout the day, Biden had remained resolute in his decision to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan. The collapse of the Afghan government hadn’t changed his mind.

McKenzie, aware of those orders, told Baradar that the U.S. mission was only to evacuate American citizens, Afghan allies and others at risk. The United States, he told Baradar, needed the airport to do that.

On the spot, an understanding was reached, according to two other U.S. officials: The United States could have the airport until Aug. 31. But the Taliban would control the city.

This decision resulted in the Taliban placing Kabul’s security in the control of Khalil Haqqani, an al-Qaeda–linked terrorist who has a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head.

This decision meant that U.S. troops had to rely on Taliban checkpoints to stop ISIS terrorists from reaching the Hamid Karzai International Airport. We know that at least one ISIS terrorist wearing an “unusually large” 25-pound suicide vest and ISIS gunmen who accompanied the suicide bomber were not stopped by those Taliban checkpoints.

This decision meant that U.S. citizens and Afghan allies also had to get past Taliban checkpoints to make it to the airport.

CNN’s Clarissa Ward reported on Monday night that she has been in touch with one Texas family that “had been going to the airport for two weeks trying desperately to get out. They all have American passports. . . . They couldn’t get past the Taliban.” At least 100 to 200 Americans have been left in Afghanistan, according to the State Department. There are likely tens of thousands of Afghan allies and their family members who are now trapped behind Taliban lines.

Last week, President Biden sent his CIA director to Kabul to ask the Taliban “to extend the withdrawal date by four days,” but the Taliban rejected the request. Biden then chose to stick to the August 31 withdrawal date. Biden made this request from a position of weakness, of course: U.S. troops were surrounded by the Taliban and were evacuating Americans and allies from an indefensible airport that could have been disabled by a “single well-placed mortar round.” If U.S. troops had been in control of Kabul, however, the United States would have been in a strong position to stay until the mission was complete — with or without the Taliban’s agreement. Biden wouldn’t have had to ask the Taliban to stay until the job was done; he could have told them.

So, we are left with at least a few important questions. How many more U.S. troops would have been necessary to secure Kabul? Biden sent in 6,000 to secure the airport, and it likely would have taken thousands more to secure the city — a population of 4 million people (a little more than half the population of Baghdad). Would the risk to U.S. troops securing Kabul have been greater, the same, or less than that of relying on Taliban checkpoints? And if the risk was greater, was that risk worth completing the mission of leaving no American behind and saving tens of thousands of close Afghan allies trapped behind enemy lines?

When Democratic congressman Jason Crow (Colo.), who served three tours of duty in Afghanistan as an Army Ranger, urged President Biden last week to ignore Taliban demands to leave by August 31, he acknowledged that flouting the Taliban’s demands carried risks. “This is a very complicated, very high-risk mission,” said Crow. “But . . . if we aren’t willing to use the U.S. military to protect U.S. citizens and our partners and our friends, then what will we use our military for?” He added that missions such as these are “why we have the biggest, strongest military in the world, and that is to protect our people.”

There were no good options as the Taliban swept Afghanistan. There’s certainly a reasonable debate about what the right course of action was on August 15. But President Biden and top military leaders owe the American people answers about the decision to reject the Taliban’s reported offer to stay outside of Kabul and let U.S. forces secure the city. An evasion by Jen Psaki and a retweet by Ron Klain aren’t going to cut it.