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Joe Concha: Image of frightened, huddling White House on Afghanistan won't go away soon

By Joe Concha

Published August 17, 2021

Fox News
Joe Concha: Team Biden's Afghanistan response is a 'five-alarm dumpster fire' Video

This article is adapted from Joe Concha's video commentary.

It's the five-alarm dumpster fire that is Team Biden’s response to the chaos in Kabul. 

You’ve seen the images by now. The Taliban took over the Afghan capital of Kabul in about the time it takes to deliver a pizza, catching the Biden administration utterly off guard. 

But when the going gets tough, the tough hides on vacation.

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The President made no public speaking comments for six days as the Taliban toppled city after city. Finally, he traveled from vacation on Camp David to Washington, D.C., did a 20-minute statement, and then ran from reporters, taking no questions.

Also missing was Vice President Kamala Harris and White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who didn't take questions until more than 48 hours after Kabul fell on Sunday. If that looks cowardly, it’s because it is. 

Psaki did take questions on Tuesday afternoon, but that was seven days after this crisis began.

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In his speech, Biden blamed everyone from Donald Trump to the Afghan government to the Afghan military, all while saying the buck stops with him.

Funny, because just last month, here’s what Biden had to say about that awesome fighting force, the Afghan military: "They clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place."

In a separate CNN town hall, Biden said he would "take responsibility for what I do and say."

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And while Biden and Harris and Psaki avoided taking questions for a week, who's out there talking to the media? The spokesman for the Taliban!

From an optics perspective, things couldn’t be going worse for Team Biden, and given the stakes here that al Qaeda 2.0 or ISIS could reemerge and attack the U.S. homeland in an even worse fashion than 9/11, this impression of a frightened White House isn't going away anytime soon. 

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Joe Concha is a FOX News contributor who joined the network in 2020. The author of several books, his latest is, "The Greatest Comeback Ever: Inside Trump's Big Beautiful Campaign" (Broadside Books, April 29, 2025).

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