A new book alleges that President Joe Biden blew up in frustration when he was told the president of Afghanistan had fled Kabul prior to the Taliban’s takeover of the city in 2021.
On Friday, Aug. 12, 2021, Biden left the nation’s capital for a mid-August vacation to Camp David. However, just three days into the trip, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told him the news that the then-president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, had fled as the Taliban was poised to march into the capital.
“Biden exploded in frustration” when he heard the news and exclaimed, “Give me a break!” according to the forthcoming book “The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future” by journalist Franklin Foer, which describes the inner workings at the White House during the calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
Biden wasn’t the only one on vacation when Ghani fled the country, and it became clear to the world that the American withdrawal from Afghanistan would be much more chaotic than the administration expected.
While the Biden White House had expected a gradual handover of responsibility to the Afghan government until Aug. 31, 2021, the date when the Taliban would begin taking an active role in governing the country, that did not occur, as the Taliban began rapidly taking over territories as the U.S. moved out of various bases, and were marching on the country before Ghani fled.
However, in the first weeks of August 2021, multiple high-ranking White House officials left for vacation. Biden left for Camp David, while Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in the Hamptons and former White House press secretary Jen Psaki took her family to the beach.
The day after Ghani fled Kabul, Aug. 16, 2021, a U.S. C-17 military transport aircraft filled with evacuees took off from Hamid Karzai International Airport. However, several people on the crowded runway grabbed onto the landing gear as the plane pulled off the runway, in a desperate attempt to escape the country.
Upon seeing the “images of Afghans falling from the sky,” which became some of the most dramatic scenes of the evacuation, Psaki knew she had to leave her family vacation, Foer wrote. She allegedly wrote to then-White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain: “I’m contemplating coming back,” with Klain responding: “I’m sorry. I think you need to.”
According to Foer’s book, Biden took an active interest in the evacuation, throwing out ideas to get more people on planes and out of the country and asking to be updated when individual people had made it safely out of Afghanistan.
While 120,000 people were evacuated from Afghanistan as the country collapsed under Taliban pressure, Foer writes that the “improvised feat of logistics” failed to overcome the impression that the Biden administration was reacting slowly.
The White House was “stung” by the fact that the toughest criticism was not just coming from conservative media but also from “the columnists and venerable reporters that Biden’s inner circle respected and tended to heed,” Foer’s book states.
Foer writes that “in the thick of the crisis, Biden didn’t have time to voraciously consume the news, but he was well aware of the tough coverage. ‘We’re getting killed,’ he would admit. It frustrated him to no end.”
The criticism, however, allegedly did nothing to change Biden’s mind about leaving the country nor change his detestation for “the conventional wisdom of the foreign policy elites,” Foer said. “After defying their delusional predictions of progress for so long, [Biden] wasn’t going to back down now.”
“In fact, everything he’d witnessed from his seat in the Situation Room confirmed his belief that exiting a war without hope was the best and only course,” Foer writes.
Foer’s book recounts the first two years of Biden’s presidency from his inauguration through the 2022 midterm elections. The book will be released on Tuesday by Penguin Random House.
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