In an interview with Savannah Guthrie on NBC’s “Today” morning news program, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson admitted that intelligence officials had warned him that the Taliban was in a position to advance on Kabul swiftly.
“There was a spectrum of predictions from the intelligence people, amongst which was the possibility that Kabul would fall very fast and the Taliban would take over very fast.”
Johnson spent much of the interview defending the Biden administrations’ handling of the withdrawal.
The public stance that the Biden administration was surprised by the Taliban’s swift advance has not held up to scrutiny. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted that he had received a cable from Kabul in July warning of rapid advance by the Taliban.
Details from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s book “Peril” present a similar story. As early as March, Blinken and US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned that if the withdrawal did not slow down, the risk of a swift Taliban advance remained an ever-present danger.
*The Taliban is a terrorist organization banned in Russia and many other countries