As the Taliban takes over Afghanistan, footage of chaotic scenes at the Kabul airport is surfacing, showing helpless and desperate people trying to flee, clinging on to US military planes.
Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, who directed the Afghan strategy for former Presidents Bush and Obama, says he is "stunned" to see these scenes unfold, but this was bound to happen.
"This is obviously not what anybody wanted, but frankly the stage was set for the tragic and desperate events ... 10 years ago, when we brought bin Laden to justice and decimated al Qaeda," he told CNN.
Since then, Afghanistan has "made too little progress" and these scenes were unavoidable, Lute added.
"This has been the accumulation of a lack of progress over at least a decade, and perhaps, arguably longer than a decade," he said Monday. "We can't rewind the clock. And in a way, this is simply culminating because of too little progress. And while the Taliban made progress, the government did not. We built security forces that, in the end, could not withstand the pressure from the Taliban. I'm afraid that we built a house built on sand."
President Joe Biden had been watching this situation closely over the years and "decided that it is time for Afghanistan to be decided by Afghans," Lute said.
"The President decided that we would leave, but the scenes we see today suggest that we believed intelligence estimates ... and we didn't plan against the worst case estimates," he said.
With where things stand today, "there's no going back," Lute explained.
"There is no Afghan army. There are no Afghan police. There is no Afghan government. The Taliban are in charge. So, we're in no position to reverse what we see today. The best we can do is to cope with the circumstances at the airport. Obviously, prioritize the evacuation of Americans, but then right behind them, the Afghans who have served alongside of us."