There is a pretty incredible report in the Washington Post where they assert that early on, after the Afghan government fell and Ghani fled, the US was given a choice by the Taliban to secure the entire city of Kabul or just the airport. The US told the Taliban they could have the city and the US would just secure the airport:
WAPO – The senior Kabul security official who had been waved away from reinforcing checkpoints that morning found out from a friend that the government he had been prepared to fight for was no more.
“The president’s gone,” the friend reported. “I think the government collapsed.”
He rushed to the airport, wanting to see for himself as an exodus began, with pilots and crews rushing to board planes and get airborne from a country suddenly confronted with a vacuum.
“Everyone was talking to each other like ‘What’s happened? What’s happened? What’s going on?’” he said.
U.S. officials were as surprised as anyone. The Americans had expected Ghani would stay for an orderly transition to an interim authority, as the agreement that negotiators in Doha had struck promised. News of Ghani’s departure, received secondhand, meant that hope had been crushed.
“He not only abandoned his country, but then unraveled the security situation in Kabul,” said a senior U.S. official. “People just simply melted away, from the airport to everywhere else.”
In the void, law and order began to break down, with reports of armed gangs moving through the streets.
“Take responsibility for securing Kabul or you have to allow us to do it”
In a hastily arranged in-person meeting, senior U.S. military leaders in Doha — including McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command — spoke with Abdul Ghani Baradar, head of the Taliban’s political wing.
“We have a problem,” Baradar said, according to the U.S. official. “We have two options to deal with it: You [the United States military] take responsibility for securing Kabul or you have to allow us to do it.”
Throughout the day, Biden had remained resolute in his decision to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan. The collapse of the Afghan government hadn’t changed his mind.
McKenzie, aware of those orders, told Baradar that the U.S. mission was only to evacuate American citizens, Afghan allies and others at risk. The United States, he told Baradar, needed the airport to do that.
On the spot, an understanding was reached, according to two other U.S. officials: The United States could have the airport until Aug. 31. But the Taliban would control the city.
Fighters were now on the move throughout Kabul, with the group’s spokesman issuing a revision of his earlier guidance: The Taliban hadn’t intended to take Kabul that day. But Ghani’s exit gave the group no choice.
At first I didn’t believe this report to be true, wondering why would the Taliban offer to let the US secure the Afghan capital? But per the reporting above, the Taliban wasn’t ready to take the city yet. Also, it is true that the US secured the airport and got no resistance from the Taliban, so clearly they had an arrangement. If the Taliban wasn’t ready to take the city yet, I can see why they might offer to let the US secure it, knowing full well the US was pulling out and would only be there for a short time.
So given the plausibility of this and the reporting that General McKenzie only chose the airport because he knew Biden wouldn’t want to send in thousands more troops, it’s absolutely insane that we didn’t take the Taliban up on their offer. It would have made the evacuations a million times easier and Americans wouldn’t now be stranded in the country. Everyone could have gotten to the airport easily and this would have been an entirely different evacuation. But Biden wanted to get out so bad that now he’s leaving Americans and who knows how many Afghan allies to the mercy of a brutal terrorist organization.
I know I keep saying it, but I never thought I’d see the day when America had a worse president than Obama. But Biden has clearly won that prize and it only took him 7 months to do it.