Biden admin failed to plan for disastrous Afghanistan exit: officials

WASHINGTON – A new State Department report places blame for the disastrous US withdrawal from Afghanistan on the Biden administration, saying it should have listened to concerns that the Afghan government would fall to the Taliban before the last American troops left Kabul — and been ready for that possibility.

The report, released Friday afternoon as much of official Washington prepared for the July 4 holiday weekend, suggests that the State Department was not prepared to conduct the enormous task of processing more than 125,000 evacuees at once because diplomatic personnel were directed to “continue embassy operations … in the belief that the security situation would not deteriorate substantially in Kabul for several months at the earliest.”

Meanwhile, military officials had made their own plans to conduct such a mammoth humanitarian operation, but the State Department said its own involvement was hampered because “it was unclear who in the Department had the lead.”

“As the Taliban’s territorial gains continued during the early summer of 2021, there was increasing alarm in many circles that led to calls for more urgent preparations for an evacuation, if not the launch of an evacuation itself,” the report said.

But the Biden administration ignored such concerns, and “seemed to rely on received assurances that the [Afghan] government and its security forces would concentrate on the defense of Kabul and believed that they could hold the Taliban at bay for some time.”

While the State Department had developed “a detailed plan to drawdown, evacuate and secure sensitive materials at the embassy,” they were forced to condense its timetable “from three days to less than 24 hours” because they were not expecting the Taliban to reach the embassy’s front door so soon, the report said.

In this way, not only did the Biden administration’s willful negligence to believe the Taliban could capture Kabul before the US left hurt Afghan evacuation efforts, it also threatened the very lives of embassy personnel, who “risk[ed] their personal safety in successfully executing the [condensed] plan,” according to the report.

The report was made public in response to House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul’s April 25 request that the State Department to declassify its After-Action Review on Afghanistan within 60 days. In a statement Friday, McCaul (R-Texas) noted that the Department had opted “to release only a small portion of that document – 24 of 87 pages that were already unclassified – and completely omitted the narrative which forms the bulk of the report.

“There is no reason not to produce a declassified version of the full report, as much of it is marked ‘sensitive but unclassified’ or ‘unclassified.’ This is another blatant attempt to hide the Biden administration’s culpability in the chaotic and deadly evacuation from Afghanistan,” McCaul added.

However, the document released Friday is more critical than the White House-released summary of an after-action report from April, which took no responsibility for Biden’s role in the rushed evacuation mission blighted by the deaths of 13 US service members and hundreds of Afghans in an ISIS suicide bombing.

While the White House refused release the full review, Biden’s National Security Council released a “summary” of the findings on the afternoon of Good Friday. That document blamed former President Donald Trump for pledging to the Taliban that the US would leave Afghanistan by May 2021 as part of the Doha agreement — a move that supposedly left his successor no option but to pull American forces out. 

“During the transition from the Trump Administration to the Biden administration, the outgoing administration provided no plans for how to conduct the final withdrawal or to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies,” the NSC public review alleged. “There were no such plans in place when President Biden came into office, even with the agreed-upon full withdrawal just over three months away.”

The summary suspiciously did not include that the Doha deal also gave the US – and thus, Biden – the right to withdraw from the accord if Afghan peace talks failed, which they did.

Unlike the Biden summary, the IG report holds both presidents responsible for their respective roles in the Afghanistan debacle.

“The decisions of both President Trump and President Biden to end the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan had serious consequences for the viability of the Afghan government and its security,” it said.

However, the report held that the Biden administration was the one that ultimately relied too heavily on platitudes from Afghan officials falsely assuring the government would not fall.

“[Afghan] President Ashraf Ghani seemed never fully to appreciate the gravity of the situation or believed that, somehow, the United States might reconsider the decision to withdraw its forces,” the report said.

The report also provided important context to the Biden summary’s claim that Trump caused amass flood of hopeful evacuees by halting the special immigrant visa (SIV) program, which allows Afghans who helped US forces apply to move to America.

But the new IG report provides important context that the processing lull in spring 2020 came as the department suspended “Embassy Kabul’s in-person interviews for Afghan Special Immigrant Visa processing … to prevent the spread of COVID.”

“COVID-related precautions also reduced opportunities to convene classified discussions at post and the Department, including those in support of crisis planning and response,” the report said. “In fact, COVID mitigation efforts meant that some new embassy employees had not met others in their offices until the embassy evacuated to the Kabul airport.”

Ultimately, the report made 11 recommendations to the State Department to prevent similar catastrophes in the future, such as to strengthen “overall crisis preparedness and response capabilities” and improve diplomats’ “direct channel to decision makers.”

“Given that [State] is charged with the safety and security of U.S. missions and personnel, [its] ability to provide its unfiltered assessment of security conditions to senior Department leadership, including the Secretary, must be ensured,” it said.

It also suggested the department create “a central repository of lessons learned and after-action reports and use them to improve crisis planning.”