Biden's credibility crisis

 Washington Examiner:

President Joe Biden and his team continue to struggle with their public messaging on Afghanistan more than a week after the fall of Kabul thrust the situation into the national spotlight.

Top Biden administration officials have put forward inaccurate, conflicting, or misleading information about the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan for weeks.

Their inability to defend a floundering evacuation effort has compounded the political fallout for Biden at home, where lawmakers outraged by the apparent lack of planning behind the drawdown have been angered even further by scrambled signals from the White House.

Here are some of the inaccurate or misleading messages from Biden officials.

VISA PROCESSING

National security adviser Jake Sullivan attempted to blame a massive backlog of Special Immigrant Visas on former Trump officials during a briefing Monday.

“When we took office in January, the Trump administration had not processed a single Special Immigrant Visa since March of 2020, in nearly a year,” Sullivan said.

His statement is untrue: The Trump State Department issued hundreds of Special Immigrant Visas to Afghans throughout 2020, according to quarterly reports on the program.

Sullivan’s accusation was part of an effort to tout the number of visas the Biden administration has issued to Afghans desperate to flee the country, pointing to efforts by the administration and Congress to streamline a 14-step process that often takes more than a year under normal circumstances.

The White House later said Sullivan misspoke and intended to say no Special Immigrant Visa interviews had taken place during that time frame.

But the interview portion of the process was largely suspended after March 2020 due to COVID rules, not because the Trump administration blocked access. The State Department reports indicate a small number of Afghans did have interviews scheduled outside Kabul, where the embassy was not offering in-person services.

'STRANDED' AMERICANS

White House press secretary Jen Psaki pushed back on the suggestion American citizens are trapped in the Taliban-controlled country as the end of the evacuation nears.

“I think it’s irresponsible to say Americans are stranded,” Psaki pointedly told Fox News reporter Peter Doocy at the White House on Monday. “They are not. We are committed to bringing Americans who want to come home, home.”

Multiple reports have suggested that Americans in Kabul cannot get through the chaos, violence, and bureaucratic confusion surrounding the airport.

The Biden administration has estimated more than 10,000 Americans were in Afghanistan before the evacuation began. The Pentagon has evacuated less than half from Kabul, and officials said they don’t know precisely how many Americans are in Taliban-controlled parts of the country that may be nowhere near the sole evacuation site.

AL QAEDA PRESENCE

Biden defended the withdrawal by falsely claiming al Qaeda had been eradicated from Afghanistan — something his own Pentagon contradicted later that same afternoon.

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There is much more.

What is apparent is a total lack of crisis management in this administration.  There appears to be no commander in charge of the evacuation effort who can speak to the efforts being taken.  They have no real clue as to how many Americans are still in the country and where they are.  Biden is clearly in over his head and he has no one on his staff with any credibility at this point either.  His Secretary of Defense and his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs appear AWOL in this crisis too.  His spokesperson appears to be dealing with a lack of consistent and material information on the crisis. 

Biden also appears to be someone without answers and overwhelmed.