CNN’s Clarissa Ward made a scathing rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s claim that American withdrawal from Afghanistan as the Taliban swiftly took power had not been a failure.
Ward, the channel’s chief international correspondent, reported live from Kabul, where she has been describing chaotic and desperate scenes as Afghan people tried to escape the country.
“We have seen and heard these reports,” Ward said, of “people so desperate they are passing and throwing their babies over the razor wire to try and get them into safety.”
“It’s the panic, the lack of clear information, the rumour mill is in overdrive. There’s hysteria. You have Taliban fighters with whips, with guns,” she added.
Ward continued: “You have US and UK soldiers who are not allowing people in. You have mixed messaging coming through about what kind of paperwork you need and how you can get on a flight and where you can go.
“It is just an absolute mess. And we heard President Biden say yesterday in his comments to ABC News that this is not a failure, and I think a lot of people outside that airport, particularly those taking the kinds of extreme actions we were just talking about would like to know: if this isn’t failure, what does failure look like exactly?”
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She was responding to an interview with ABC News, in which President Biden refused to accept blame for the scenes unfolding in Afghanistan.
“When you look at what’s happened over the last week,” host George Stephanopoulos asked him, “was it a failure of intelligence, planning, execution or judgment?”
Mr Biden responded: “Look, it was a simple choice, George.
“When you had the government of Afghanistan, the leader of that government, get in a plane and taking off and going to another country; when you saw the significant collapse of the Afghan troops we had trained, up to 300,000 of them, just leaving their equipment and taking off — that was, you know, I’m not, that’s what happened. That’s simply what happened.
“And so the question was, in the beginning, the threshold question was, do we commit to leave within the timeframe we set, do we extend it to Sept. 1, or do we put significantly more troops in?”
