(RepublicanInformer.com)- Back in April during an interview with John Solomon’s Just the News, Florida Senator Marco Rubio warned that if the US withdrew its forces from Afghanistan, the Taliban would eventually take over the country.
“Eventually” ended up being a matter of days.
As soon as President Biden announced the US withdraw in April, the Taliban began seizing areas in northern Afghanistan. By August, it was poised to take Herat and Kandahar leading many to suspect it was only a matter of weeks before the capital of Kabul fell. In reality, the Taliban took Kabul only two days after Kandahar fell.
During his interview in April, Rubio expressed that he didn’t have a lot of faith that the current civilian government could stand up against the Taliban. And he was right. Over the weekend, Afghan president Ashraf Ghani fled the country for the United Arab Emirates, allegedly taking with him all the cash his helicopter could carry.
But Senator Rubio wasn’t the only one warning of an inevitable Taliban takeover.
It was reported on Thursday that one month ago US diplomats at the Kabul embassy sent a classified memo to Secretary of State Antony Blinken warning that the Afghan government was at risk of collapse.
This memo was sent through the State Department’s Dissent Channel on July 13 – just five days after President Biden expressly denied that a Taliban takeover was inevitable. According to one source, the cable was immediately brought to Secretary of State Blinken’s attention.
Nearly two dozen embassy staffers signed on to the dissent cable – a rarely utilized forum for foreign service officers to raise internal concerns regarding US policy. The memo predicted that the Afghan government would collapse shortly after the president’s deadline for withdrawal was met.
When the news broke on Thursday, State Department spokesman Ned Price declined to comment on the contents of the cable, saying that dissent cables are “strictly between” the State Department leadership and the cable’s authors.
But the existence of this dissent cable exposes the Biden administration’s claim that nobody anticipated the rapid takeover by the Taliban once the US withdrew. Clearly those on the ground in Afghanistan knew it was coming.
The memo also urged the Biden administration to use stronger language to condemn the Taliban’s atrocities committed as they swept through province after province. Their greatest concern was the lack of action from Washington to safely remove those Afghan allies who worked with US forces during the 20 year conflict.
After he read the dissent cable, Secretary Blinken reportedly said that the concerns voiced in the memo reflected much of the State Department’s thinking.
And yet President Biden continues to deny that his administration had any notion that the Taliban would so easily take over Afghanistan.
