The House Foreign Affairs Committee Republican report, released exactly one year after the nation’s capital fell to the Taliban, reveals additional new details about the Biden administration’s failure to adequately plan and execute the U.S. withdrawal from the Afghanistan. The report also says the administration did not accurately portray the nature of events on the ground and failed to put in place a plan to prevent American Afghan commandos from being recruited by America’s adversaries. “Many of the Biden administration’s evacuation plans were made in the spring of 2021 — some even before the president announced the withdrawal. And they were never updated despite Taliban gains on the battlefield, despite a worsening security situation and despite revised intelligence estimates,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. President Joe Biden announced in mid-April 2021 that the US would withdraw all remaining troops from Afghanistan by September 11 of that year — the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that started America’s war there. While Biden has long wanted to end US involvement in the Afghanistan war, he attributed the decision, in part, to the deal brokered with the Taliban by the Trump administration, which had pledged to withdraw by May 1, 2021. In the weeks and months that followed, bipartisan lawmakers urged the administration to ensure plans were in place to ensure the protection of Afghans who worked for the U.S. during the nearly two-decade conflict, including evacuation options. Both the State Department and the Pentagon have conducted their own reviews of the withdrawal, but neither department has released any findings. The Pentagon’s review is ongoing, while the State Department completed its own in March, according to a source familiar with the review. The delay in its release is due, in part, to an interagency review process with concerns about policy, visibility and effective implementation of lessons learned. The House report found that as recently as mid-June 2021, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul held an Operational Planning Team (OPT) meeting with members of the U.S. military and U.S. diplomats that focused on pre-planning for non-combatant evacuation operations (NEOs). . The meeting was described by a US military officer who attended as “the first time” the embassy began “looking into the NEO possibility”. Due to the “complete lack of proper planning by the Biden administration” there were consequences: evacuation flights were “taking off at only about 50% of their capacity” five days into NEO, the report said. The report cites slow processing at the gates and chaos outside the gates — a government evacuation process so chaotic and disorderly that even staffers for Vice President Kamala Harris and First Lady Jill Biden were contacting outside groups to try to get people out, representatives of the groups told the committee.
The evacuation flights carried the vast majority of men
The report found that those who were able to get on those evacuation flights were overwhelmingly men, despite concerns — now confirmed — about women being denied liberties when the Taliban took over.
“We now know through data from the Departments of Homeland Security and Homeland Security that only about 25 percent of those evacuated during NEO in Afghanistan were women or girls. refugee outflows,” Ambassador Kelley Currie, the State Department’s Office of Global Women’s Affairs under the Trump administration, wrote in the report.
As Kabul fell and then-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, two top American officials — General Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, then head of the U.S. Central Command, and Zalmay Khalilzad, then the special representative for Afghanistan brokered by the US-Taliban deal under Trump — met with Taliban officials in Doha, where the militant group offered the US control of the capital’s security.
McKenzie testified that he declined the offer, telling Congress in September 2021, “That was not why I was there, that was not my directive, and we did not have the resources to undertake that mission.”
However, Khalilzad told the committee he believed “we could consider it,” the report said. The former official also said the US had not ordered the Taliban out of Kabul.
“We didn’t say ‘don’t go.’ We advised them to be careful,” Khalilzad said, according to the report. Meanwhile, US officials had repeatedly said the US supported peace talks between the Taliban and the Ghani government.
Those who tried to leave the city were then forced to face the Taliban threat as they tried to reach the airport, where thousands gathered outside the gates in a desperate bid to get inside and on a flight. And in the first days of the evacuation, airport operations were so poor that groups of Afghans arrived on the runway and desperately tried to hold up departing planes.
“Since the administration ceded control of Kabul to the Taliban, it was a very tactical challenge. But it was the decisions they made — or in some cases failed to make — that led to this tactical challenge,” McCall said.
While this chaos unfolded, the report argues that the administration “repeatedly misled the American public” by attempting to downplay the bleak situation on the ground and instead paint a picture of competence and progress.
The report juxtaposes comments by State Department officials with internal memos, including one dated Aug. 20 saying at least seven Afghans “died while waiting outside the access gates of HKIA (Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul)” and that the Taliban “refused to accept the remains’ of the bodies kept at the airport.
“At one point, State Department spokesman Ned Price encouraged people to make their way to the airport and told the press that the evacuation was ‘effective and efficient,’ but the airport gates were closed and internal memos spoke of how they also existed. a lot of bodies at the airport and they don’t know how to deal with it all,” McCall said.
Biden’s manager declined to take part
The committee requested transcribed interviews with more than 30 government officials, but the Biden administration declined to take part. For the report, the commission relied on interviews and information from whistleblowers, conversations with people who were in Kabul during the withdrawal, and fact-finding trips to the region. Republicans leading that probe are in the minority, meaning they have no subpoena power, but they have indicated they will issue subpoenas and continue to investigate the recall if their party takes the House in elections this year. They call it an interim report. The report also says the administration failed – even months after the withdrawal – to take steps to prevent US-trained Afghan commandos from being recruited by US adversaries such as Iran, China or Russia. “The U.S. government evacuated about 600 Afghan security forces who assisted in the evacuation by providing perimeter security and other functions, but they represent a very small fraction of the U.S.-trained units who fought alongside U.S. troops. And even those who were lucky fugitives were stranded in third countries,” the report said, adding that 3,000 Afghan security forces fled to Iran according to a SIGAR report earlier this year. As of July, the Biden administration still had no plan to prioritize evacuating those Afghans from the region, with the State Department awaiting a policy decision from the NSC, the report said.
