‘Who’s Going to Get Fired For This?’ Peter Doocy, John Kirby Battle It Out Over Afghan Evacuation Report

Fox News White House reporter Peter Doocy threw down with John Kirby when he interrogated the White House spokesman over the newly-released report on the U.S. withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.

Kirby accompanied Karine Jean-Pierre at the White House press briefing on Thursday, where he faced a deluge of questions about the summary report on the Biden administration’s 2021 decision-making in Afghanistan

The summary foists much of the blame on Donald Trump’s administration, arguing that the former president’s dealings with the Taliban forced Biden into a situation of “severely constrained” options, nor was there a plan left for Biden to execute the withdrawal. This subsequently led to the eruption of chaos when the U.S. scrambled to evacuate people as the Taliban took control of the country.

Doocy came out swinging as he invoked the report to ask Kirby “who is going to get fired over this?” Kirby answered by claiming the document’s purpose is “not accountability,” so Doocy challenged him for his defenses of America’s military and intelligence assessments on Afghanistan

“I said intelligence is hard. They get it right a lot, too,” Kirby said. “This document and this effort isn’t about accountability today. It is about understanding, and I would also add the review process is not over. This is the next muscle movement in will be a long process to better understand, comprehend and adjust to what we learned and what we did in Afghanistan.”

Doocy kept up the relentless drill-down, and Kirby became visibly tense in his retort:

Doocy: People don’t have an issue with the decision to order troops out of Afghanistan. It is with the way the president ordered it done. There were children being killed. There were people hanging off of air force jets that were leaving, and you’re saying you guys are proud of the way this mission was conducted?”

Kirby: Proud of the fact that we got more than 124,000 people safely out of Afghanistan? You bet. Proud of the fact that American troops are able to seize control of a defunct airport and get it operational in 48 hours? You bet. Proud of the fact that we now have about 100,000 Afghans, our former allies and partners, living in this country and working towards citizenship? You bet. Does that mean everything went perfect in that evacuation? Of course not.

I’ve talked about it from a different podium. The after-action reviews are now being reviewed by measures of Congress, which will lay out things that could’ve gone better. Nobody is saying that everything was perfect, but there was a lot that went right, and a lot of Afghans are living better lives in this country and other countries around the world because of the sacrifices and the work of so many American government officials. So yeah, there is a lot to be proud of, Peter.