A US government review of the chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 has largely placed the blame on the Trump administration.
An inter-agency review led by the National Security Council found the departing Trump administration had in early 2021 left the incoming government of Joe Biden “with a date for withdrawal, but no plan for executing it”.
The Biden administration sent confidential reviews of the pullout of forces from Afghanistan to Congress on Thursday. It also published a 12-page summary report.
The report says Mr Biden’s “choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor”.
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It suggests the White House learned lessons from the chaos of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“We now prioritize earlier evacuations when faced with a degrading security situation. We did so in both Ethiopia and Ukraine. ”
The report says it is hard to imagine the United States would have been able to lead the response to the invasion of Ukraine, hold Russia to account for its aggression or compete with China in the resource-intensive way that it has if US forces were still in Afghanistan.
“Ultimately, after more than 20 years, more than $2 trillion dollars, and standing up an Afghan army of 300,000 soldiers, the speed and ease with which the Taliban took control of Afghanistan suggests that there was no scenario – except a permanent and significantly expanded US military presence – that would have changed the trajectory. ”
Republicans in the US Congress have sharply criticised the Afghanistan withdrawal and, in particular, have pointed to the deaths of 13 service personnel in a suicide bombing at Kabul’s airport in August 2021.
The Biden administration report says in his final 11 months in office, Mr Trump had ordered a series of reductions of US troop levels that by June 2020 were down to 8,600 personnel.
[ US completes final withdrawal from Afghanistan, 20 years after invasionOpens in new window ]
“In September 2020, he directed a further draw down to 4,500. A month later, President Trump tweeted, to the surprise of military advisors, that the remaining US troops in Afghanistan should be ‘home by Christmas!’”
It says the outgoing Trump administration provided no plans for how to conduct the final withdrawal or to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies. “Indeed, 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. ”
Mr Trump, the report says, emboldened the Taliban by publicly considering inviting them to Camp David on the anniversary of September 11th in 2019.
In February 2020, the US and the Taliban reached a deal, known as the Doha agreement, under which the United States agreed to withdraw all US forces from Afghanistan by May 2021.
The report does point to faulty intelligence regarding the scope of the Taliban to take over the country.
It says that as late as May 2021, “the assessment was still that Kabul would probably not come under serious pressure until late 2021 after US troops departed”.
Ultimately, it says, Mr Biden refused to send another generation of US troops to fight a war that should have ended long ago.
US national security council spokesman John Kirby praised US forces for their actions in running the largest airborne evacuation of non-combatants in history during the chaos of Kabul’s fall.
“They ended our nation’s longest war,” he told reporters. “That was never going to be an easy thing to do. And as the president himself has said, it was never going to be low grade or low risk or low cost.”
