A year after US troops leave, accountability in short supply
As weary US military planners wrapped up the evacuation and pull-out from Afghanistan one year ago, officials across the government steeled themselves for intense public scrutiny into how America’s longest war ended in shambles with the Taliban retaking power.
But as the United States marks the first anniversary of the withdrawal this month, some US officials and experts say President Joe Biden’s administration has moved on without properly assessing lessons from the 20-year war and the Taliban victory.
Nor has there been public accountability for the chaotic evacuation operation that saw 13 US service members killed at Kabul’s airport and hundreds of US citizens and tens of thousands of Afghans left behind, they said.
“We need to open up that ugly history book called the 20 years in Afghanistan and see why we fail,” said John Sopko, the US special inspector general tapped with tracking some $146 billion in reconstruction aid.
These lessons are especially crucial now as the administration pumps billions of dollars of assistance into Ukraine’s fight against Russia, Sopko told Reuters news agency.
US policymakers, however, are now preoccupied with Russia’s onslaught against Ukraine and soaring tensions with China, even as the Taliban erase women’s rights, harbour militants from Al Qaeda and execute and torture former government officials.
The Biden administration portrays the pull-out and extraction operation - one of the largest airlifts ever - as an “extraordinary success” that wound up an “endless” conflict that killed more than 3,500 US and allied foreign troops, and hundreds of thousands of Afghans.
The evacuation ferried more than 124,000 Americans and Afghans to safety over 15 days. Tens of thousands of Afghans, many of whom worked for US forces, now have resettled in the United States in the largest US refugee operation since the Vietnam war.
To be sure, Biden was left a mess by his predecessor Donald Trump, who committed to completing the troop pullout by May 2021 without processing a massive backlog of visa applications from Afghans who worked for the US government.
“We inherited a deadline in Afghanistan, but not a plan for withdrawal,” a National Security Council spokesman said.
But some US officials, experts and private evacuation organisers say the administration has avoided taking responsibility for misreading the speed of the Taliban advance. The US military and the state department have been preparing so-called “afteraction reviews” on their roles in the withdrawal. But it is unclear if those reports will be made public.
Michael Kugelman, a senior associate for South Asia at the Wilson Center think-tank, said that Washington had not shown a willingness to think about what went wrong in Afghanistan. “I have been struck that much of Washington has appeared keen to essentially put Afghanistan in the rearview mirror and try to move on,” Kugelman said.