Despite more than 50 planning meetings, the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan spiraled into devastating chaos. They had failed to anticipate contingencies and plan for the worst-case scenarios. When they did plan, it was too late.
The calamitous withdrawal hammered Biden and his principal advisers. Critics in op-ed pieces and on television leveled blame on National Security Adviser Sullivan, calling for his resignation. And this time, it wasn’t just coming from Republicans.“The national security adviser has two jobs. As the name suggests, they are the last and ideally closest counselor to the president in the Situation Room,” former Obama adviser Brett Bruen said in USA Today.“Their second duty is to translate the commander in chief’s decisions and direction into practical policies. Sometimes that requires speaking truth to power. On all of these scores, the current occupant of the office appears to have failed.“President Biden needs to fire his national security adviser and several other senior leaders who oversaw the botched execution of our withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Bruen said.Sullivan, who was accustomed to laudatory reviews of his competence and performance, was shell-shocked. “All of our nerves had been exposed to sunlight and frayed and raw and burned,” he said, especially his.Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley and Vice Admiral Frank Whitworth, a three-star career Navy intelligence official and Milley’s J2—the top military intelligence adviser in the Pentagon—pored over the second-order and third-order effects of the withdrawal to see what threats could be ahead.Milley and Whitworth were close. They had served together in Afghanistan. When Trump appointed General Milley to be his next chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Whitworth had spent every day in the run-up briefing Milley to take over the role.When Admiral Whitworth was ready to move from his two-star role into a three-star position, Milley stepped in and personally petitioned the Pentagon to make the J2 intelligence post into a three-star role so General Milley could keep Whitworth alongside him.Now both felt the sting of Kabul’s swift fall. For months they had chewed on tabletop exercises, tweaking preparations, and been briefed on the latest intelligence.They had seen a degradation in the ability of the Afghans to defend themselves, but not how swiftly the collapse would be.“To me it was a cascading event that was much faster than I had anticipated,” Whitworth said frankly. He had been on a family holiday in Hawaii when the first province fell to the Taliban, another province an hour later and then a third.“I could see what was happening,” he said. He wasn’t in a SCIF, a sensitive compartmented information facility, but sent a note to the Pentagon: “Get our folks to safety.” They needed to speed up the withdrawal
