Elliot Ackerman: ‘There Was No Plan’ for Large Evacuation of Allies from Afghanistan, and That ‘Does Fall on the Biden Administration’

During an interview with PBS’ “Firing Line” released on Friday, Writer for The Atlantic and author Elliot Ackerman said that “there was no plan in place for a large-scale evacuation” of our allies from Afghanistan and the blame for this “does fall on the Biden administration.”

Ackerman said [relevant remarks begin around 8:10] that evacuating allies fell on private citizens “Because there was no plan in place for a large-scale evacuation of our Afghan allies, and that is a huge mistake. There’s plenty of blame that can go around for the endgame in Afghanistan. I mean, this is a war that was fought across four presidencies, Republican and Democrat. But the blame for there not being a contingency plan for a mass evacuation of Afghanistan does fall on the Biden administration.”

He continued, “Do I understand why an evacuation wasn’t carried out before our withdraw date in August? I do. And I think the rationale that the Biden administration had was between April of 2021, when the announcement to withdraw occurred, and September 11, 2021, when the last U.S. troops were originally supposed to be out of Afghanistan, the Biden administration didn’t begin evacuating our Afghan allies because they were concerned that that would be a vote of no confidence in the Afghan government and would then precipitate that government’s collapse. That’s an understandable position. But that is a strategy and a position that relies completely on there being what’s called the decent interval. That’s a term going back to the Vietnam War, meaning the interval of time between the U.S. withdrawal and whatever the endgame is in the country. And so, the Biden administration bet that there would be some interval of time between the last U.S. troop leaving Afghanistan and the endgame between the Afghan government and the Taliban, whether that decent interval is two years, a year, six months, there would be some amount of time. When there was no decent interval and Afghanistan collapsed on our watch, there was no contingency plan in place to get our Afghan allies out. And that’s why you wound up seeing what many have called this digital Dunkirk, a crowdsourced effort to get people out of the airport and all of the chaotic scenes pretty much every American saw on the news that summer.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett