'Painful lessons': Review faults Biden, Trump for Afghanistan mayhem
4 Min Read
A telling review details the faults and misgivings of the US administration that led to the most chaotic withdrawal and evacuation efforts in the last decade.
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Families walk toward flights during ongoing evacuations at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan on August 24, 2021. (AP)
According to a State Department report issued Friday, the Biden administration is largely to blame due to the bureaucratic lethargy and lack of awareness during the withdrawal of the US from Afghanistan.
The review criticizes the handling of the most catastrophic evacuation since Saigon and details how Biden and former President Trump underestimated the military hasty withdrawal's effect on the US-backed Afghan government at the time.
Additionally, standard summer diplomatic rotations in the weeks leading up to the Taliban taking over Kabul left the US evacuation in the hands of personnel who had only been in the country for a few days or weeks.
Read more: US withdrawal is now a national holiday in Afghanistan
The review added that the Taliban assumed power following the disastrous withdrawal that killed dozens of Afghans and at least 13 US service members and severely decreased Biden's approval numbers.
Despite killing tens of thousands of civilians during their occupation of the country, US soldiers opened fire on the crowd outside the Hamid Karzai International Airport, killing several civilians, including women and children.
According to a senior State Department official who spoke to reporters anonymously, “What this report reveals is that in crises that are longer duration, that are particularly complicated, that occur at a large scale, that impact populations well beyond the official American community, we haven’t over time had the appropriate structure and resources available to provide that foundation, a steady, constant set of capabilities that we can draw on when we’re suddenly confronting something at scale."
The report details that while the US military had begun planning for a full evacuation of Kabul "for some time" before August 2021, the State Department's preparations for the evacuations were "hindered by the fact that it was unclear who in the Department had the lead."
Findings add that senior US officials gave “insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios."
Several officials expressed displeasure with what they thought to be a lack of attention in Washington to how dire the situation of the US forces was in Afghanistan as the Taliban took over in an earlier review of the evacuation conducted by the US military.
Navy Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, the top US commander on the ground during the operation, expressed that “if policymakers had paid attention to the indicators of what was happening on the ground," then US troops would have been much more capable of handling the evacuation situation.
State Department officials have shrugged off evaluations like Vasely's. Jalina Porter, a State Department spokeswoman, stated last year that “cherry-picked comments do not reflect the months of work that were well underway” and the total work that diplomats put to make the evacuation effort easy.
John Kirby also dismissed the operation's instability, stating as recently as April that he didn't "buy the whole argument of chaos" during the operation.
"It was tough in the first few hours," Kirby remarked at the time when the White House informed Congress that the evacuation should have been ordered sooner. “You would expect it to be; there was nobody at the airport and certainly no Americans. It took time to get in there," he said.
Earlier this year, Afghan refugees protested in Pakistan's capital on January 13, as an American program to assist in the relocation of at-risk Afghans fleeing after the hasty US withdrawal stalled.
Read next: Invaded, massacred, now 'abandoned': Afghan trauma from US continues
