White House: We Prepared for ‘Low-Probability’ Afghanistan Worst-Case Scenarios

On Friday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Situation Room,” White House National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby responded to claims in a State Department report that there was a failure to plan for worst-case scenarios during the planning of the withdrawal from Afghanistan by stating that President Joe Biden’s team prepared for “low-probability, high-risk worst-case scenarios” and Biden wanted this from the early going.

Host Wolf Blitzer asked, “The State Department [says] that — in this report they said that it was a chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, saying there was insufficient consideration of what it described as the worst-case scenarios. Did that failure to plan for the worst case cost lives?”

Kirby answered, “I’ll tell you, Wolf, and I talked about this back in April, when we laid out a review — or summary of some of these after-action reports, which were classified and delivered to the Hill with full transparency, that the President wanted his team from the very early going to be planning for exactly worst-case scenarios. And in fact, that was built into the planning process way back in the spring of 2021, and he regularly sought and received updates from his national security team about how that planning was going, but it was low-probability, high-risk worst-case scenarios that he wanted the team to be ready for.”

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