Donald R. Allen/U.S. Air Force via AP
The evacuation, August 24, 2021
A month before the Taliban stormed Afghanistan’s capital, two dozen diplomats in the U.S. embassy in Kabul sent a memo to the State Department warning of imminent collapse. The July 13 dissent cable warned Secretary of State Tony Blinken that the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul would quickly follow a U.S. withdrawal. They said an urgent plan to evacuate Afghan partners was needed.
It was a message that never reached the White House and the National Security Council, which was coordinating President Biden’s directive to end the 20-year war in Afghanistan.
Indeed, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan only learned about the memo after it was reported in The Wall Street Journal, a month after it had been sent, according to three well-placed sources who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss the dissent cable.
It’s a lapse that reflects how centralized power in Biden’s orbit has constrained necessary communication among the country’s top national-security leaders.
Biden exhibited political courage by leaving Afghanistan, and after a slow start, the administration has evacuated over 82,000 people from the Kabul airport between August 14 and August 25, according to White House figures. The final exit was never going to be easy. Some opponents of the policy have focused on the circumstances of the pullout as cover for their desire to retain an occupying force indefinitely.
But despite that, it’s undeniable that the way the U.S. has drawn down—from the rapid collapse of the Afghan government, to the photographs that parallel the U.S. escape from Saigon, to the bungled initial evacuation of Afghan allies and their families—reveals inept coordination.
Within Biden’s brain trust, there are too few advisers who voice dissenting perspectives, or who listen to those who do.
Dissent cables are sent infrequently, just a handful of times a year. An entire procedure is built around the dissent channel to protect staffers who deliver bad or unwanted news to their superiors. The memos tend to address a narrow issue or policy, which makes the July cable from Afghanistan exceptional.
The diplomats warned of “rapid territorial gains by the Taliban and the subsequent collapse of Afghan security forces, and offered recommendations on ways to mitigate the crisis and speed up an evacuation,” according to the Journal. Routed to Blinken and the department’s director of policy planning, Salman Ahmed, its key points were not immediately conveyed to the White House.
The State Department defended the way the Afghanistan dissent cable was handled, saying that Secretary Blinken reads and responds to every dissent cable. “[W]e keep communication strictly between the Department’s leadership and the authors of the dissent messages,” a State Department spokesperson said in an email to the Prospect. “In this case, the ideas were quickly integrated into ongoing contingency planning.” The White House would not officially comment.
Sipa USA Sipa USA via AP
Secretary Tony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan listening to President Biden’s remarks about the evacuation from Afghanistan, August 20, 2021
Biden himself has taken responsibility for the withdrawal’s missteps, but the National Security Council didn’t put the pieces together. The national security adviser, whose job is to synthesize the president’s foreign-policy choices, is coordinating the departments involved in the withdrawal.
Within Biden’s brain trust, there are too few advisers who voice dissenting perspectives, or who listen to those who do. Many of the president’s key personnel are lifelong aides, and many previously worked in Biden’s office when he served in the Senate or as vice president. They waited out the Trump administration in a handful of think tanks or strategic consultancies, such as the boutique firm WestExec Advisors, which Blinken co-founded in 2017 and which has staffed the administration with 17 officials. This community of longtime collaborators and staunch loyalists around Biden means that everyone salutes the president, and no one speaks up.
Diplomats in the field must have sensed that the State Department’s executives were not operating with urgency. Biden hasn’t announced an ambassador to Afghanistan, and a senior South Asia official is not yet in place.
The Defense Department has also moved too slowly since Biden announced the withdrawal in April. The military’s criticisms may have been misconstrued by Biden’s inner circle as part of its resistance to withdrawing, rather than concerns about how it would be done.
Intelligence agencies had documented the Taliban’s advance. Maybe Biden’s inner circle didn’t want to hear the bad news, or maybe it came too late. “The Taliban are making significant military advances; they’re probably in the strongest military position that they’ve been in since 2001,” CIA Director Bill Burns had plainly stated in a rare radio interview on July 22. Since the nation’s spies were frustrated about losing intelligence-gathering capabilities, their naysaying about the withdrawal was likely read as reticence to withdraw at all, not a fair warning that more planning was needed.
The entire team seems to have ignored a crucial, disturbing fact that has bedeviled Afghanistan policy for years: that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s government was exceptionally corrupt, unpopular, and weak. Any way this withdrawal played out over weeks or months, the U.S. was in reality handing the reins of power over to the Taliban. The Biden team missed it because the doomsday situation was too glaring, or there were not enough contrarians on board.
The unheeded dissent cable is a reminder of the urgent need for better communication—and more dissent in the president’s inner circle.
