With the adage in mind that the shortest distance between two points on a sphere, such as Earth, is "the great circle distance," President Biden would have been well advised to sack his top intelligence people the day after Kabul became a days-long, above-the-fold story. The president needed to loop his political credibility from Washington to Kabul and back to Washington again asap, and a merciless campaign of intelligence heads rolling would have been the fastest, shortest way to accomplish that.
Biden isn't responsible for intelligence gathering. He's responsible for making foreign policy decisions after his intelligence wizards supply him with reliable information. In Afghanistan, they were less than wizardly. "The president’s top intelligence officers … privately offer[ed] concerns about the Afghan abilities. But [in late spring] they still predicted that a complete Taliban takeover was not likely for at least 18 months." And yet it's President Biden taking the heat from all sides.
Required was a heat shield, pronto. An early, brief presidential news conference — which would have instantly changed the headlines from Kabul to insider politics — could have provided some protection: "Today I'm announcing the resignations of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Joints Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken, secretary of state, effective immediately. You'll soon learn the names of their replacements. And if they can't turn the Kabul situation around in 48 hours, I'll fire them, too. If necessary, I'll continue firing intelligence and logistics staff until the job of evacuating all Americans and all our allies from Afghanistan is properly concluded."
Would this necessarily have improved the situation on foreign ground? Of course not. But a president's political capital is the most precious of all his commodities. Without that, his domestic and foreign policies will suffer crises of confidence from the outside. The longer President Biden takes heat for Kabul, the less power he'll have in selling the raft of policies that remain to be sold.
So yes, sacking his top intelligence people forthwith would have been the equivalent of stone-cold killings, unlikely to do much good on the ground. Looking forward, however, it's not Afghan ground that will trouble President Biden.