A new report on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan

The August 2021 withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan produced some of the Biden administration’s worst days. The withdrawal also led to profound change and trauma for the people of Afghanistan: The U.S.-backed government fell, the Taliban returned to power, frightened Afghans jammed Kabul Airport in desperate efforts to flee, and the withdrawal and evacuations were punctuated by an Islamic State attack that killed 170 Afghan civilians and 13 U.S. service members.

Nearly two years later, the Biden administration has released the main findings of an almost two-year review of the withdrawal and the decisions that led to those fateful days. The National Security Council (NSC) shared a 12-page summary of its review Thursday, which acknowledges that the withdrawal was rushed, the administration misjudged the rapid advance of Taliban forces, and the overall evacuation effort should have begun sooner.

“Clearly we didn’t get things right here with Afghanistan with how fast the Taliban was moving across the country,” said White House spokesman John F. Kirby. Kirby — and the report itself — noted that the U.S. has instituted policies to carry out such evacuations sooner when security conditions worsen.

But the NSC release and Kirby’s answers were noteworthy for their defensive tone as much as their acknowledgment of errors. For the most part, the Biden administration is seen as having done well to navigate an extremely fraught situation, while the Trump administration comes in for blame — particularly for brokering the initial deal with the Taliban to withdraw American troops by the spring of 2021. That deal, the argument goes, left the Biden White House with few good options — and the Trump administration had also cut U.S. troop levels from 10,000 to 2,500, bequeathing the Biden team a force outnumbered by Taliban fighters. And of course the Taliban commanders knew — thanks to the Trump deal — that the rest of the Americans would soon be gone. Afghan security forces knew it too.

“It was a general sense of degradation and neglect there that the president inherited,” Kirby said. “And do not underestimate the effect that the agreement (with the Taliban) had on the morale and the willingness to fight on the Afghan National Security defense forces.”

Many analysts — and of course many enemies of the Biden administration — believe the White House should take more of the blame.

While the Biden administration was dealt a bad hand in Afghanistan, and any U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was certain to result in Taliban gains and a general loss of security, it’s hard to recall those days and not fault the planning and execution of the withdrawal, and in particular the evacuation of Afghan nationals who had worked for the U.S.

As part of his defense Thursday, Kirby repeatedly praised the U.S. military for its airlift of Afghan evacuees and the care American medical staff provided after the airport bombing. Few would take issue with those assessments — but it was less easy to accept another: “For all this talk of chaos, I just didn’t see it,” Kirby said.

Grid and others have reported extensively on the haphazard nature of the evacuations and the failure of the State Department to expedite special immigration visas (SIVs) for those Afghans who had served with the U.S., often at great risk. Perhaps “chaos” is in the eye of the beholder, but Afghans were trampled trying to reach the airport gates to show their papers, others fainted after days spent waiting in the crush of people, and a few infamously clung to the belly of a U.S. cargo plane as it lifted off the tarmac. Pick your image; for days on end, the chaos was everywhere apparent.

As for the inheritance of a bad policy, some have noted that the Biden administration eagerly dismissed other Trump plans and policies; the new White House was not obligated to continue with the withdrawal as Trump’s Taliban deal had outlined.

In the end, what happened during those dark and difficult days was made worse by what followed. The Taliban takeover drove Afghan women back into the shadows. Schools were shuttered, and women were banned from many professions. Meanwhile, thousands of those Afghans who worked for the U.S. were caught in an immigration catch-22: Afghans seeking asylum in the U.S. needed in-person interviews with American officials — but there were no American officials left inside Afghanistan itself.

As is nearly always the case in Washington, politics hangs over the NSC review. It was released as members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee probe the same questions, and Republicans and Democrats have debated the same questions as to whether the past or present occupants of the White House are to blame.

“This administration’s brazen whitewashing of their failure in Afghanistan is disgraceful, unjust, and flat-out insulting,” the Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) wrote on Twitter Thursday.

Who ultimately was to blame for the August 2021 debacle? The answer would seem to be both the Trump and Biden administrations. The former had a flawed plan and made an ill-conceived deal with the Taliban; the latter made mistakes in the execution of the withdrawal and evacuation of Afghan nationals. It’s hard, in this environment, to imagine that conclusions on Capitol Hill will come with that sort of nuance.