New Delhi, Sept 02:
Talking about the last phone call between Joe Biden and Ashraf Ghani, accessed by news agency Reuters, the White House said that it won’t get into private diplomatic conversations or leaked transcripts of phone calls but what has been reported as Biden’s last advice to Ashraf Ghani remained Biden’s public advice for Afghanistan leaders, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said.
“What the President conveyed publicly, and certainly privately as well, repeatedly, to Afghan leaders — as did our national security officials — is that it’s important that the leaders in Afghanistan do exactly that: lead and show the country that they are ready to continue to — the fight against the Taliban; that they have the will for the Afghan National Security Forces to continue that fight even as our US forces leave,” the press secretary said.
Reuters reported that the last phone call between Biden and Ashraf Ghani was on July 23– just 23 days before the fall of Kabul in which none of the leaders appeared to have any inkling about the imminent takeover of the country by the Taliban. In that call, Biden promised Ghani close air support and advised him to mobilise Afghan leaders to change the perception of the world that the Taliban were winning.
To this advice, Ashraf Ghani informed Biden that the country was facing a full-scale invasion and the Taliban were not alone as over 10 to 15,000 Pakistani terrorists were already inside the country at that time.
The White House said that Biden has been consistently conveying this to the Afghan leadership that they were required to lead. “The President has consistently conveyed — and I just noted an example — publicly that the Afghan leadership, at the time, needed to do exactly that: lead. They needed to come together in a cohesive manner. They needed to be united. They need to just show the country and the Afghan people they were going to fight and they are going to lead through this transition, even as US forces left. That is entirely consistent with what he has said publicly throughout,” the press secretary said.
Confirming that it’s true that the fall of Kabul was not anticipated, Psaki said, “what I can reiterate for you is that we have stated many times that no one anticipated — the vast majority, I should say — there may have been individuals and agencies, so I don’t want to eliminate that option — but our national security team and no one in Congress or, I would say, most people out in the public anticipated that the Taliban would be able to take over the country as quickly as they did or that the Afghan National Security Forces would fold as quickly as they did.”
