The US State Department on Friday released its long-awaited Afghanistan After Action Review report, which outlines damning findings and criticizes both the Trump and Biden administrations for decisions that led to the deadly and chaotic US withdrawal from that country after nearly two decades on the ground.
The unclassified version of the report, which was publicly released more than a year after the 90-day review of the evacuation was completed, includes findings around the tumultuous final weeks of the US presence in Afghanistan, as well as a number of recommendations for improvement moving forward.
A senior State Department official did not explain why it had taken so long for the report to be published, nor why it was released before a holiday weekend, saying they would not discuss questions related to “process.”
The Biden administration’s frenzied withdrawal after 20 years of US involvement has come under immense scrutiny by predominantly Republican lawmakers. However, accusations about who was responsible for the chaotic final weeks have fallen largely along party lines, with Republicans pointing fingers at the Biden administration and Democrats, including the White House, casting blame on the Trump administration for the deal that set the US withdrawal into motion.
Notably, the State Department report released Friday stated that “the decisions of both President (Donald) Trump and President (Joe) Biden to end the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan had serious consequences for the viability of the Afghan government and its security.”
“Those decisions are beyond the scope of this review, but the AAR (After Action Review) team found that during both administrations there was insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios and how quickly those might follow,” the report said.
It noted that prospect of the withdrawal of all US military forces – set into motion under the Trump administration – “presented an enormous challenge” to the US State Department, and “when the Trump administration left office, key questions remained unanswered about how the United States would meet the May 2021 deadline for a full military withdrawal, how the United States could maintain a diplomatic presence in Kabul after that withdrawal, and what might happen to those eligible for the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program as well as other at-risk Afghans.”
The review found that once Biden decided in April 2021 to proceed with full withdrawal, with a new deadline of September 11, 2021, the subsequent speed of the US military’s “retrograde” from Afghanistan “compounded the difficulties the Department faced in mitigating the loss of the military’s key enablers.”
“Critically, the decision to hand over Bagram Air Base to the Afghan government meant that Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) would be the only avenue for a possible noncombatant evacuation operation (NEO),” the report stated.
The handling of that evacuation operation has been one of the areas where the administration and the State Department have received the most criticism, as thousands of Afghans who had served alongside US forces were left behind and those on the ground struggled through perilous circumstances to try to reach the airport and get out before government-led evacuation efforts ended.
“U.S. military planning for a possible NEO had been underway with post for some time, but the Department’s participation in the NEO planning process was hindered by the fact that it was unclear who in the Department had the lead,” the review found. “Coordination with DoD worked better on the ground in Kabul.”
“Senior administration officials had not made clear decisions regarding the universe of at-risk Afghans who would be included by the time the operation started nor had they determined where those Afghans would be taken. That added significantly to the challenges the Department and DoD faced during the evacuation,” the report said.
This story is breaking and will be updated.
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