{"id":647388,"date":"2021-08-15T12:20:47","date_gmt":"2021-08-15T16:20:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=647388"},"modified":"2021-08-15T12:20:49","modified_gmt":"2021-08-15T16:20:49","slug":"how-did-president-biden-get-this-so-wrong-jake-tapper-presses-antony-blinken-on-afghanistan-exit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/how-did-president-biden-get-this-so-wrong-jake-tapper-presses-antony-blinken-on-afghanistan-exit\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018How Did President Biden Get This So Wrong?\u2019: Jake Tapper Presses Antony Blinken On Afghanistan Exit"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">32<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fhow-did-president-biden-get-this-so-wrong-jake-tapper-presses-antony-blinken-on-afghanistan-exit%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=647388&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/Screen-Shot-2021-08-15-at-10.00.48-AM-e1629042069474.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" \/><\/div>\n<p>Jake Tapper minced no words Sunday when he challenged Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the Biden administration\u2019s rapid exit from Afghanistan.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHow did President Biden get this so wrong?\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/dailycaller.com\/2021\/06\/22\/jake-tapper-richard-blumenthal-filibuster-cnn\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Tapper<\/a> asked, pointing to a press conference six weeks earlier in which President Joe Biden had said a Taliban takeover of <a href=\"https:\/\/dailycaller.com\/2021\/08\/13\/meghan-mccain-biden-afghanistan\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Afghanistan<\/a> was not \u201cinevitable.\u201d <strong><a class=\"text-black\" href=\"https:\/\/dailycaller.com\/2021\/08\/13\/flashback-biden-predicts-taliban-takeover-afghanistan-not-inevitable\/\">(RELATED: FLASHBACK: Biden Predicts Taliban Takeover In Afghanistan Is \u2018Not Inevitable\u2019)<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>WATCH:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is not just about the overall idea of leaving Afghanistan but hastily and ineptly. How did President Biden get this so wrong?\u201d Tapper asked after introducing Blinken.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cJake, first let\u2019s put this in context,\u201d Blinken pushed back, saying that the U.S. had long ago completed the initial objective of taking out Osama bin Laden. \u201cWe vastly diminished the threat posed by Al Qaeda in Afghanistan to the U.S., to the point where it is not capable of conducting such an attack again from Afghanistan.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAgain, the issue here is not just the withdrawal of U.S. forces. It\u2019s how they were withdrawn,\u201d Tapper continued, noting that former President Barack Obama\u2019s ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, had called the Biden administration\u2019s abrupt exit \u201ca handover to the Taliban\u201d and said it left him with \u201cgrave questions\u201d about Biden\u2019s ability to lead.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDoes President Biden not bear the blame for this disastrous exit from Afghanistan?\u201d Tapper asked.<\/p>\n<p>Blinken did not directly answer the question. He said that the U.S. and others had worked to prepare the Afghan security forces to defend themselves. \u201cAnd the fact is we\u2019ve seen that force has been unable to defend the country. That has happened more quickly than we anticipated,\u201d Blinken added.<\/p>\n<p>Tapper continued to press, redirecting Blinken once more to the premise of his question, which was \u201chow poorly this was done.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe idea that President Biden ordered 2500 service members out and now is sending up to 5,000 service members back in, does that not on its face show the exit was ineptly planned?\u201d Tapper asked, noting that Biden had said just a month ago that it was \u201chighly unlikely\u201d that the Taliban would take over: \u201cHe was wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Blinken again pivoted back to the idea that having troops in <a href=\"https:\/\/dailycaller.com\/2021\/08\/15\/taliban-fighters-enter-kabul-afghan-president-ashraf-ghani-flees\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Afghanistan<\/a> indefinitely was an unsustainable solution. \u201cIt is simply not in the national interest,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou keep changing the subject to whether we should be there forever. I\u2019m talking about whether or not this exit was done properly,\u201d Tapper insisted. \u201cTaking out all the service members before those Americans and those Afghan translators could get out. That is what I\u2019m talking about. Then you have to send people back in. That is the definition of oh, we shouldn\u2019t have taken those troops out because now we have to send twice as many back in.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think it shows we were prepared,\u201d Blinken objected. \u201cWe had the forces on hand. And they were able to deploy very quickly again to make sure we could move out safely and securely as the situation on the ground changed.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Tapper went on to ask Blinken whether he was prepared to guarantee that all remaining Americans in Afghanistan would be able to get out safely \u2014 and Blinken did not appear to have an answer.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat is job number one. That is our number one mission,\u201d Blinken replied.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jake Tapper minced no words Sunday when he challenged Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the Biden administration\u2019s rapid exit from Afghanistan.\u201cHow did President Biden get this so wrong?\u201d Tapper &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-647388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=647388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647388\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=647388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=647388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=647388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}