State Department Review Blames Biden for Afghan Withdrawal Debacle

Taliban* fighters overran all 34 of Afghanistan’s provincial capitals in the space of 10 days in August 2021, catching evacuating US and allied forces off-guard, and causing the Kabul government and the country’s NATO-trained military to crumble in their wake.

President Biden, his administration and predecessor Donald Trump bear responsibility for the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, a State Department report has concluded.

"The decisions of both President Trump and President Biden to end the US military mission posed significant challenges for the Department as it sought to maintain a robust diplomatic and assistance presence in Kabul and provide continued support to the Afghan government and people" a summary of the unclassified After Action Review on Afghanistan released Friday noted.

The report indicated that the Biden administration’s nod on accelerating the evacuation of Afghans who had assisted US and NATO forces over the course of the 20-year occupation of the country helped trigger a domino effect which ultimately led to the Western-backed government’s disintegration.

"As conditions on the ground deteriorated and the prospects for successful peace negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban grew dimmer, leadership in the Department and at Embassy Kabul faced the dilemma that significantly reducing the remaining US presence in Afghanistan and accelerating the departure of at-risk Afghans risked undermining confidence in the Afghan government and triggering the very collapse the United States hoped to avoid," the review said.

The accelerated withdrawal of US troops which began in April 2021, after Biden gave the go-ahead to proceed with Trump’s promised exit, had "serious consequences for the viability of the Afghan government and its security," the report said, noting that "during both administrations there was insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios and how quickly those might follow."

The State Department also rapped the Biden White House over its decision in the spring of 2021 to hand the strategic Bagram Air Base to the Afghan government, thus ensuring that the smaller Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul became "the only avenue for a possible noncombatant evacuation operation."

Additionally, the report said, organizational issues hindered the State Department’s operational planning of the evacuation and it "was unclear who in the Department had the lead” in the process. The lack of guidance from senior Biden administration officials on which Afghans were to be counted as at-risk "added significantly to the challenges the Department and [the military] faced during the evacuation."

The Biden administration has faced significant flak over the speedy collapse of the NATO-backed Afghan government within months of the president’s announcement that Washington would be exiting the country after 20 years of occupation and $2 trillion spent fighting the Taliban. The Afghan withdrawal debacle has been compared in scale to the humiliating US withdrawal from Saigon in 1975.

Former President Trump, who got the ball rolling on the US exit from Afghanistan in 2020 and committed to withdraw US forces by the spring of 2021 in exchange for a halt to attacks on American troops, and talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government on a negotiated settlement, criticized his successor repeatedly over the manner through which the withdrawal took place. Trump has not elaborated much on what he would do differently, except to say that he would not hand over Bagram Air Base under any circumstances, including after US forces were gone from the rest of the country.

* Under UN sanctions for terrorist activities.