NBC anchor Chuck Todd said Tuesday on “MSNBC Live” that the United States’ chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan will damage President Joe Biden’s image of competency.
Jackson asked, “Why were we so caught off guard here? Chuck, what do Afghans need to hear from the administration broadly this morning?”
Todd said, “From the point of view of Afghans…how long is this process of evacuating Afghans going to last, how open will we be to bringing out more Afghans who want out? Where are we going to take them? How is the process worked? Are we cutting red tape? All of those things. ”
He continued, “The big long-term question, why were we so unprepared for this moment? You can’t help but come to two sort of conflicting theories. I don’t know if we’re ever going to get an answer that is going to feel satisfying and goes to some combination of the president had his mind made up before he took the oath of office which direction he was going and the Pentagon, I think, they always thought they could buy more time and for whatever reason didn’t plan for every contingency.”
Todd added, “You got to ask, how, the orderly part of this, what went wrong? I do think the biggest political fallout is competency. Joe Biden’s greatest strength against Donald Trump in the campaign was the idea that he has been around the block, he knows what he’s doing, we’re facing this crisis with COVID, we need some basic competency back in government, no more chaos. He’s lost the competency high-marks that he was getting at one time, and that’s tough to get back.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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