A damning new report says the US-led withdrawal from Afghanistan was carried out without any planning, descended into “chaos and confusion” and ended with “tragic but avoidable results”.
On the first anniversary of the Taliban takeover of Kabul that led to the sudden mass evacuation of thousands of displaced Afghans, Republicans on the US House Foreign Affairs Committee have released a dossier outlining how they say the operation was handled.
The heavily redacted 121-page report pulls no punches.
“Choices made in the corridors of power in D.C.,” he says, “led to tragic but avoidable outcomes: 13 service members dead, American lives still at great risk, increased threats to our national security, stopped at abroad for years to come. , and embolden enemies around the world.”
It claims that President Joe Biden’s administration waited until “a few hours before the Taliban took over Kabul” to make key evacuation decisions.
“Very little was done to prepare for a Taliban takeover of the country” or for evacuation, he said.
And he also claimed that, despite acknowledging for months that not evacuating them posed a significant security risk, the administration made “no effort to prioritize the evacuation of U.S.-trained Afghan commandos and other elite who possess sensitive knowledge of US military operations.” .
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Many of these personnel, he continued, “have been forced to seek refuge in Iran where they could be exploited for their information.”
The report claims that even President Biden’s own officials have described the end of the US presence in Afghanistan as a “strategic failure” and “an ugly final phase.”
More than 15,000 Afghan and British citizens were evacuated from the city by Royal Navy, British Army and Royal Air Force personnel in what Defense Secretary Ben Wallace described as “biggest British evacuation since World War II”.
In its conclusions, the committee states that President Biden favored an unconditional withdrawal from Afghanistan, after consultations with senior advisers and US military allies.
However, it says: “There is ample evidence, including direct testimony from US military leaders and key NATO allies, that they supported a continued conditional deployment in Afghanistan.”
This meant maintaining an advisory and counterterrorism mission of 2,500 US military personnel alongside 6,000 mostly NATO forces.
The report also states:
• At the height of the evacuation, only 36 US consular officers were on the ground in Kabul, despite having to process more than 100,000 evacuees.
• About 1,450 Afghan children were evacuated without their parents
• Problems during the evacuation were compounded by mixed messages from the State Department to Americans and Afghan allies on the ground, and a lack of adequate equipment and personnel at the airport.
Image:
President Biden pauses when asked about bombings at Kabul airport that killed at least 12 service members just before the evacuation
President Biden has called the operation an “extraordinary success” that brought more than 124,000 Americans and Afghans to safety and ended an “endless” war in which about 3,500 American and allied troops were killed and hundreds of thousands of Afghans.
He then told the American people: “Last night in Kabul, the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history.
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The mission was an “extraordinary success”
“We completed one of the largest airlifts in history … more than double what most experts thought was possible.
“No nation, no nation has ever done anything like this in all of history. Only the United States had the ability and the will and the ability to do it, and we did it today.
“The extraordinary success of this mission was due to the incredible skill, bravery and selfless courage of the United States military and our diplomats and intelligence professionals.”
The foreign affairs committee of the US House of Representatives (lower house) consists of 27 Democrats and 24 Republicans, but the report was produced only by the “minority” party, namely the Republicans.