Evacuees wait to board a Boeing C-17 Globemaster III during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 23, 2021. The federal government’s review of the chaotic 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan concludes the evacuation should have started sooner and faults former President Donald Trump for failing to pass on information and intelligence to President Joe Biden before he took office. (Isaiah Campbell/U.S. Marine Corps)
WASHINGTON — The federal government’s review of the chaotic 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan concludes the evacuation should have started sooner and faults former President Donald Trump for failing to pass on information and intelligence to President Joe Biden before he took office.
"Biden's choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor," the White House summary of the report states.
The summary also notes when Biden entered office, "the Taliban were in the strongest military position that they had been in since 2001, controlling or contesting nearly half of the country."
The evacuation, which ended Aug. 31, 2021, officially ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan for the United States. It also marked the return of Taliban rule in the country, rolling back many human rights in the past 20 months, particularly for women.
Many aspects of the pullout were chaotic, and led to 13 U.S. service members being killed near a gate of the Kabul airport by a pair of suicide attacks. During the evacuation, thousands of Afghan nationals fled the country with the U.S. military.
The full classified federal report on the exit was given to Congress on Thursday, but the White House issued a summary of its findings. The report is the result of many months of investigations by Biden’s administration into the decision-making process of leaving Afghanistan.
“What you have got in that document is a pretty fair summary of our perspectives of the work over those many months,” John Kirby, the chief spokesman for the National Security Council, told reporters at the White House.
The summary points to various issues and problems with the withdrawal. However, the report lays most of the blame on Trump’s administration — mainly for failing to bring Biden’s transition team up to speed in late 2020 and early 2021 on what was happening in Afghanistan or disclosing information on U.S. confidence in former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s leadership and the ability of his forces to defend themselves after American forces left.
“When President Trump took office in 2017, there were more than 10,000 troops in Afghanistan. Eighteen months later, after introducing more than 3,000 additional troops just to maintain the stalemate, President Trump ordered direct talks with the Taliban without consulting with our allies and partners or allowing the Afghan government at the negotiating table,” the 12-page summary reads.
Major Gen. Chris Donahue, commander of the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division, XVIII Airborne Corps, boards a C-17 cargo plane at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 30, 2021. Donahue was the final American service member to depart Afghanistan. (Alex Burnett/U.S. Army)
The report also concludes Trump emboldened the Taliban by publicly considering whether to invite them to Camp David on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“President Trump also pressured the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban fighters from prison, including senior war commanders, without securing the release of the only American hostage known to be held by the Taliban,” according to the report summary.
The summary also faults Trump’s Doha Agreement, a pact that was negotiated between the U.S. and the Taliban that required all NATO forces to leave Afghanistan, including the withdrawal of several thousand American troops by mid-2020 and the withdrawal of all U.S. troops by May 2021. When Biden took office, he extended the evacuation deadline to August on the advice of experts and military commanders on the ground in Afghanistan.
“Clearly, we did not get things right here … with how fast the Taliban was moving across the country,” Kirby said. “[Biden] came in with a certain set of circumstances he had no ability to change.”
He added that Trump’s deal with the Taliban turned out to be “very corrosive” to the morale of Ghani’s troops and Kabul’s confidence in U.S. support.
“As the security situation in Afghanistan worsened over the summer, the [Biden] administration grappled with the tension between highlighting growing warning signs of potential collapse and undermining confidence in the government of Afghanistan and Afghan forces’ will to fight,” the summary document states, noting there were serious intelligence gaps. “[The collapse] unfolded more quickly than [the intelligence community] anticipated. In fact, the collapse was more rapid than either the Taliban or the Afghan government expected.”
The hectic withdrawal from Afghanistan caused political fallout for Biden, though he has remained steadfast that the pullout was the right thing to do after two decades of war. House Republicans have promised congressional investigations into his decision and some have blamed Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for making poor decisions that resulted in the loss of American and Afghan lives.
“We remember the 2,461 American service members and personnel who made the ultimate sacrifice in this war,” Austin said in a statement issued Thursday about the report. “Even on the hardest days, including August 26, 2021, when we tragically lost 13 of our finest, our force performed admirably under incredibly challenging conditions.”
But the summary emphasizes — despite all that went wrong — a lot went right during the war and the evacuation. U.S. troops first arrived in Afghanistan in late 2001 as a direct response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. One of its primary goals was to find al-Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden, who was killed during a U.S. raid in neighboring Pakistan in 2011.
Last year, Biden’s administration created the Afghanistan War Commission, an independent panel of former government officials and experts who will spend four years studying the 20 years of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.
“This review was an important step to inform future [Pentagon] decision-making,” Austin said. “I strongly believe that a thoughtful and comprehensive examination of the entirety of America’s longest war by the commission will be an important contribution to the nation.”
Kirby said: “The mission that we were originally sent into Afghanistan for was accomplished a long, long time ago. Over time, the mission in Afghanistan morphed into something that it wasn’t intended to be originally.”
