BY TOM
O'CONNOR ON 2/4/22 AT 1:19 PM EST
A report released by leading Republican lawmakers has argued
that President Joe Biden's administration did not sufficiently prepare
for the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan,
detailing a series of perceived missteps that led to scores of U.S. citizens
and partnered Afghans becoming stranded as the Taliban took
power.
The 148-page document, entitled "United States Senate Committee
on Foreign Relations Minority Report" and published Thursday by ranking
Republican member Senator James E. Risch, argued that the administration
"ignored numerous intelligence reports about the potential for a speedy
Taliban takeover of Kabul, decided to abandon Bagram Air Base, disregarded
dissent cables from the State Department (State), failed to plan an evacuation
until it was too late, and in the process, abandoned tens of thousands of
Afghan partners."
"The
failure of senior Biden Administration leadership to plan for this fateful day
resulted in a rushed evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Americans,
third-country nationals, and Afghans," the report said. "It left
behind hundreds, possibly thousands, of American citizens, tens of thousands of
Afghan partners, and a legacy of American betrayal of allies."
The decision to end the two-decade U.S. war in Afghanistan was
taken under Biden's predecessor, Donald
Trump, who signed a peace treaty with the Taliban in February 2020.
After coming to office, Biden announced he would push back the stated
withdrawal date to September 11, the 20-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks
that first drew U.S. intervention in the country, which was ultimately moved to
August 31.
But the
Taliban took the capital two weeks before that date, and in one of the key
arguments put forth by Republican lawmakers, the report argued that the
National Security Council's Deputies Committee did not gather until the
afternoon before the group effectively won the country's civil war.
"Having
wasted 115 days, the NSC did not conduct its first senior meeting to discuss
the withdrawal until August 14 at 3:30 p.m., just hours before Kabul fell, when
evacuations became life or death for Americans, Afghans, and U.S. military
personnel," the report said.
U.S. soldiers stand guard behind barbed wire as Afghans sit on a roadside near the military part of the airport in Kabul on August 20, 2021, hoping to flee from the country after the Taliban's military takeover of Afghanistan.WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The report identified the Deputies Committee as the relevant
body responsible for planning contingency logistics, such as those required to
suddenly airlift thousands of people from war-torn Afghanistan. Lawmakers
found, however, "there is no
record provided that the DC met any time before August 14 to begin discussions
on safe
and orderly relocations out of Afghanistan."
"The
summary of conclusions from the DC meeting on August 14 included actions which
should have been taken months in advance, including but not limited to:
reaching out to third countries to serve as transit points, alerting locally
employed U.S. embassy staff about relocation, and standing up a communication/
manifest team for flights out of Kabul," the report said. "It is
inexcusable that the DC met at such a late date."
During
that meeting, the report said the Deputies Committee "was formally tasked
to "immediately stand up a communications / manifest team responsible for
notifying individuals from various priority lists," including U.S.
citizens. At that same meeting, the White House tasked the State Department to
"work to identify as many countries as possible to serve as transit
points" for evacuees, the report said.
The
report said that U.S. officials from the State Department, the Department of
Defense nor any other authority had been given prior instruction on how to
handle the tens of thousands of people who sought to immediately leave
Afghanistan. The figure included some 17,000 Afghans who had applied for
Special Immigration Visa but had not yet been cleared to enter the U.S., along
with their family members.
"Until
this point, State, DoD, and other departments and agencies had no senior-level
direction on how many individuals they needed to evacuate, who they were or how
they were to be processed, where the U.S. government was supposed to transport
these people, and what to do with them when they reached their
destination," the report later added.
Biden has received a degree of backlash over the fallout of the
Afghanistan withdrawal from both parties, but Republicans have
been especially scathing in their criticism. The administration, for its part,
has repeatedly defended its handling of the exit.
In
response to the latest Republican allegations, State Department spokesperson
Ned Price told reporters there was "a lot in that report that we would
take issue with."
And
while he said he was "not going to speak to the specifics of a purportedly
leaked document," he also noted that "no single document is
reflective of the totality of months and months of work and planning on any
issue." Price then went on to give further context to the final, harrowing
months of the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and laid some blame on the
prior administration.
He said
Biden had "inherited" an "SIV program that had been in many ways
intentionally starved." The program, he argued, "was basically at a
standstill" and "had not conducted a single interview in Kabul since
March of the previous year, March of 2020."
"After
taking office, we surged resources and staff in order to issue nearly 8,400
SIVs in the first year of this administration," Price said. "And
since August 30th, since the end of the U.S. military mission, we have brought
about 3,500 U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, and SIV holders and
their immediate families out of Afghanistan. We are prepared to bring out
thousands more this year, as operational and security conditions permit, in
collaboration with our partners."
He also
pointed to the successful evacuation of around 124,000 people in total from
Afghanistan, of which 76,000 were Afghans who have already been resettled in
the U.S.
And he
said U.S. officials "continue to work expeditiously to bring more Afghans
out and to welcome more of our Afghan allies and their families to their new
lives here in the United States."
People sit on the wreckage of a Soviet-era tank mounted with a Taliban flag at the Darwaza-e-Kandahar area in Herat on February 3. In spite of occasional attacks conducted by ISIS and a looming humanitarian crisis, Afghanistan has returned to a period of relative stability since the U.S. military withdrawal.WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The president has also stood his ground. Days after the fateful
August 14 Deputies Committee gathering, as the U.S. scrambled to organize an
airlift of U.S. nationals and Afghans who assisted in the military campaign,
Biden told ABC News he faced an impossible task.
"The
idea that somehow, there's a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing — I
don't know how that happens," Biden said in the August 18 interview.
Chaotic
scenes continued to ensue as other Afghans attempted to flee Taliban rule. In
the worst uptick of violence that accompanied the pullout, the Islamic State
militant group's local Khorasan branch (ISIS-K) conducted a suicide bombing
that killed nearly 200 people, including 13 U.S. soldiers, near Hamid Karzai
International Airport on August 26.
On
August 31, the final U.S. military aircraft left Afghanistan, and Biden
announced the end of the war in televised remarks. In his address, he took
responsibility for the withdrawal and argued why he could not have acted sooner
or in a more organized fashion.
"I
take responsibility for the decision," President Biden said. "Now,
some say we should have started mass evacuations sooner and 'Couldn't this have
been done in a more orderly manner?' I respectfully disagree."
"Imagine
if we had begun evacuations in June or July, bringing in thousands of American
troops and evacuating more than 120,000 people in the middle of a civil
war," he said. "There still would have been a rush to the airport, a
breakdown in confidence and control of the government, and it still would have
been a very difficult and dangerous mission."
"The
bottom line is: There is no evacuation from the end of a war that you can run
without the kinds of complexities, challenges, and threats we faced,"
Biden added. "None."
While
turmoil continued to ensue in Afghanistan in the form of clashes between the
Taliban and resistance factions as well as a spat of more bloody ISIS-K
attacks, the country has returned to a state of relative stability since the
U.S. withdrawal and now faces a bigger problem: a humanitarian crisis brought
on by cold weather, economic insecurity and food shortages.
Taliban
officials have vowed both during the U.S. exit and afterward not to pursue
reprisal attacks against foreign nationals or locals who supported the U.S.-led
war effort. Reports have emerged nonetheless of Afghans being targeted for
their role in the fight against a group now in charge of Afghanistan, but few,
if any, instances of U.S. citizens facing retaliation.
https://www.newsweek.com/gop-report-biden-had-no-afghanistan-exit-plan-till-hours-before-kabul-fell-1676350
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