Representative Adam Schiff on the Afghan crisis: it looks like a “failure of military planning”

Representative Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Rejected President Biden’s claim that the ongoing chaos that erupted in Afghanistan amid the military withdrawal was inevitable.

“I don’t think we can take it as a premise that the chaos that we saw particularly early on, but which continued, was inevitable,” Schiff said Tuesday in an interview on MSNBC. “There was going to be some difficulty, yes, when we pulled out. But I think there should have been better planning involved in the evacuation, in the withdrawal. Now we’re looking at the intelligence and, you know, the intelligence over the last six months has been increasingly pessimistic about the ability of the Afghan government to sustain itself. ”

BIDEN FIRE FOR NOT TAKING QUESTIONS, TALKING ABOUT ‘BUILDING BETTER’ BEFORE THE AFGHANISTAN CRISIS

“I’m not ready to draw a conclusion – certainly no intelligence has suggested that it would collapse overnight like it did in a matter of days when Kabul fell, but nonetheless, you would assume that there would be military planning alongside any foreseeable contingency plan to avoid that kind of difficulty where we would have thousands of Americans at risk of being stranded, ”Schiff continued.

When asked by MSNBC host Ari Melber if he thought the problem was “military planning” or if it was President Biden’s “decision-making process”, Schiff responded by expressing support. the decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, but still indicated that things have gone wrong in the planning.

“To me, and it’s a first impression at this point, it sounds like a planning failure, a military planning failure as to how we evacuate our personnel,” Schiff told Melber. “There may be more responsibility than that in going around, not just to put him at the feet of the military, but it seems to me that the military usually makes plans for every eventuality – there is nothing but plans on the shelf of what might happen – and how to use the best army – the best equipped army in the world, to displace our people and our friends who risk their lives with us. can’t imagine we didn’t have a plan for a quick collapse. “

“So we’re going to have to do a thorough review not just of the past two weeks but of the past 20 years and why after all this blood and treasures we managed to protect the country from yet another 9/11 but we didn’t failed to lift the government that the Afghans would fight for, ”Schiff added.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

On Monday, the chairman of the House Intel Committee expressed doubts that the Biden administration will meet its own August 31 withdrawal deadline following a meeting with senior officials.

“I think this is highly unlikely given the number of Americans yet to be evacuated, the number of SIVs, the number of other members of the Afghan press, civil society leaders, women leaders, it’s hard for me to imagine all of this can be accomplished by the end of the month, “Schiff told reporters.