In the months before the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden administration officials “watered down” warnings about crumbling security and failed to launch an emergency evacuation of Americans and Afghan allies until it was too late, says a new report by House Republicans.
The scathing report from GOP lawmakers on the House Foreign Affairs Committee accuses President Joe Biden and his deputies, especially the acting ambassador to Kabul, of botching the 2021 pullout by reducing troop levels while keeping a large embassy staff in place and failing to prepare evacuation plans. The report was based on internal State Department documents and testimony from officials.
“Our investigation reveals the Biden-Harris administration had the information and opportunity to take necessary steps to plan for the inevitable collapse of the Afghan government,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, the committee’s chair. “At each step of the way, however, the administration picked optics over security.”
Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee dismissed the report in advance, saying it was a purely partisan exercise timed for political effect in the final stage of this year’s presidential election. Biden administration officials have defended how they handled the exit and accused former President Donald Trump of tying their hands by agreeing to a flawed deal with the Taliban that committed the U.S. to withdrawing all troops by May 2021.
According to experts and former officials, however, while each political party has tried to blame the other, both Trump and Biden share responsibility for the debacle in Afghanistan. Trump reduced American troop levels in Afghanistan from 13,000 to 2,500 after he agreed to a flawed pact with the Taliban, and Biden bungled the execution of the withdrawal itself.
Both presidents strongly supported pulling U.S. troops out, ignored the Taliban’s failure to abide by their commitments and rejected advice from military commanders to retain a small U.S. force on the ground. Afghan refugee advocates and former officials say neither the Trump nor the Biden administrations prepared detailed contingency plans for an evacuation of U.S. Embassy staff and Afghan allies.
“Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do,” Trump said after Biden announced the withdrawal in April 2021. Trump criticized Biden for not sticking to a May withdrawal deadline and later boasted that he had made it difficult for his successor to reverse his decision to pull out. “I planned to withdraw on May 1st, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible,” he said.
The last U.S. troops left Afghanistan on Aug. 30, 2021.
The House report says many U.S. officials in Kabul tried to convey the dire security situation in the months leading up to the withdrawal but that their superiors played down the warnings and sanitized their memos. The report cited government documents and interviews from an internal State Department “after action report” obtained by the committee.
Greg Sherman, a senior official in the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, recounted how officials watered down memos outlining security threats before they were sent on to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the report said, citing the State Department’s internal review of the withdrawal.
“He believed this was done pursuant to the pressure imposed by State Department leaders to keep Embassy Kabul open despite the Taliban’s rapid territorial gains in the spring and summer of 2021,” the report said.
After Biden announced in April that all U.S. troops would leave by the end of August, an employee at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul described being stunned that “our posture had not shifted to a point that we could get out relatively easily,” the report said, citing the State Department documents. Embassy staff members “tried to raise these issues in various ways, but post leadership never wanted to hear it,” the report said.
By July 13, 2021, 26 officials and staff members at the embassy wrote to senior leadership about their concerns in a “dissent cable,” the State Department’s official channel for expressing internal disagreements. Warning the Afghan government would lose control in Kabul soon after American troops departed, the cable urged the State Department to take its evacuation planning seriously, address the backlog of visa applications from Afghans who worked for the U.S. government and secure the safety of those aiding the embassy in Afghanistan.
The report focuses heavily on what it said was a failure by the White House and the State Department to plan for an emergency evacuation of Americans and Afghans out of the country in case of a Taliban takeover. It also criticized what it said was the Biden administration’s failure to promptly order the evacuation once circumstances deteriorated.
A State Department employee said that given that the U.S. withdrawal was announced six months in advance, “more should have been done to prepare for the eventuality of the military departure,” the report said, citing the State Department’s internal review. The employee described complete inaction by the embassy and said “not making a decision was the embassy’s decision,” the report said.
The report pins much of the blame on the acting ambassador in Kabul, Ross Wilson, alleging he failed to properly plan for a possible emergency evacuation even as the Afghan government’s survival appeared increasingly tenuous. As the security situation deteriorated and U.S. troop levels dramatically declined, Wilson increased embassy staffing and resisted repeated appeals from military commanders to formally request an evacuation of civilian personnel.
In previous testimony to the committee, Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time of the withdrawal, said the State Department’s decision not to request an evacuation of personnel until Aug. 15 — the day Kabul fell to the Taliban — was a “fundamental mistake” that led to the frenzied scenes at the Kabul airport.
Wilson, in previous testimony to the committee, defended his actions and the timing of his request for an evacuation, arguing that the embassy staff could not have helped Afghans trying to get out had they left earlier.
“I’m comfortable with the conclusion that I came to when I came to it,” Wilson said.
The report criticized the embassy and the State Department over the plight of tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked as interpreters or in other jobs for the U.S. military or government but could not gain entry to the airport, even though they had the proper paperwork. In the months leading up to the withdrawal, the State Department never defined the size of the Afghan population that was eligible for evacuation or how their cases could be handled, the report said.
It was not until late July — weeks before the Taliban seized power — that the State Department launched an operation to start flying out Afghans who were promised special immigrant visas.
Instead, amid the confusion at the airport, significant numbers of Afghans with no work histories for the U.S. government were able to secure spots on flights out of Kabul, the report said.
Much of the criticism of the Biden administration in the report has been expressed by Republican lawmakers previously in the years since the withdrawal.
Trump’s role
The report offers muted criticism of the Trump administration. Trump, who at one point ordered a complete withdrawal before his advisers persuaded him otherwise, reduced the troop footprint to 2,500 by the time he left office, even though the Taliban had failed to live up its promises to reduce violence and cut ties with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Trump also privately proposed that the leaders of the Taliban be invited for peace talks at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland.
The report singles out Trump’s envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad — who negotiated the agreement that committed the U.S. to pulling out — for criticism. It accuses Khalilzad of trusting the Taliban’s written promises despite evidence they were not fulfilling their commitments, and it says Khalilzad undermined the Afghan government’s legitimacy by shutting them out of negotiations.
U.S. officials had hoped that the Afghan government would still be in control by the time American troops departed by a scheduled September deadline, but the Afghan army rapidly collapsed as U.S. forces — and contractors — departed.
By the time the evacuation launched, the Taliban controlled Kabul, and there was growing concern about a possible security breakdown or a terrorist attack at the airport. As a result, the Afghans who worked at the embassy for years became a low priority as officials focused on trying to get State Department employees onto waiting aircraft, the report said.
A State Department employee said embassy leadership “failed” the local staff. “They weren’t prioritized,” the employee said, according to the report.
At one point, a group of Afghan staff members who had made it into the airport and were expecting to be evacuated were escorted out, the report said.
The fears of a terrorist attack on the crowds at the airport were realized when a suicide bomber killed 170 civilians and 13 U.S. military personnel in what became known as the Abbey Gate bombing. The Afghan ISIS affiliate known as ISIS-K claimed responsibility for the attack.
