Missteps marked pullout
Look at timeline finds wrong turns early-on
WASHINGTON — Interviews with key participants in the last days of the 20-yearlong war in Afghanistan show a series of misjudgments and the failure of President Joe Biden’s calculation that pulling out U.S. troops — prioritizing their safety before evacuating U.S. citizens and Afghan allies — would result in an orderly withdrawal.
Although Biden White House officials say that they held more than 50 meetings on embassy security and evacuations, and that so far no Americans have died in the operation, all the planning failed to prevent the mayhem when the Taliban took over Kabul in a matter of days.
The top national-security officials assembled at the Pentagon early on April 24 for a secret meeting to plan the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. It was two weeks after Biden had announced the exit over the objection of his generals, but now they were carrying out his orders.
In a secure room in the
building’s “extreme basement,” two floors below ground level, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met with top White House and intelligence officials. Secretary of State Antony Blinken joined by videoconference. After four hours, two things were clear.
First, Pentagon officials said they could pull out the remaining 3,500 U.S. troops, almost all deployed at Bagram Airfield, by July 4 — two months earlier than the Sept. 11 deadline Biden had set. The plan would mean closing the airfield that was the U.S. military hub in Afghanistan, but Defense Department officials did not want a dwindling, vulnerable force and the risks of service members dying in a war declared lost.
Second, State Department officials said they would keep the U.S. Embassy open, with more than 1,400 remaining Americans protected by 650 Marines and soldiers. An intelligence assessment presented at the meeting estimated that Afghan forces could hold off the Taliban for one to two years. There was brief talk of an emergency evacuation plan — helicopters would ferry Americans to the civilian airport in Kabul, the capital — but no one raised, let alone imagined, what the U.S. would do if the Taliban gained control of access to that airport, the only safe way in and out of the country once Bagram closed.
The plan was a good one, the group concluded.
Four months later, the plan is in shambles as Biden struggles to explain how a withdrawal most Americans supported went so badly wrong in its execution. Friday, as scenes of continuing chaos and suffering at the airport were broadcast around the world, Biden went so far as to say that “I cannot promise what the final outcome will be, or what it will be — that it will be without risk of loss.”
Biden administration officials consistently believed they had the luxury of time. Military commanders overestimated the will of the Afghan forces to fight for their own country and underestimated how much the American withdrawal would destroy their confidence. The administration put too much faith in Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who fled Kabul as it fell.
Only in recent weeks did the administration change course from its original plan. By then it was too late.
‘DON’T KNOW YET’
Five days after the April meeting at the Pentagon, Milley told reporters on a flight back to Washington from Hawaii that the Afghan government’s troops were “reasonably well-equipped, reasonably well-trained, reasonably well-led.” He declined to say whether they could stand on their own without U.S. support.
“We frankly don’t know yet,” he said. “We have to wait and see how things develop over the summer.”
Biden’s top intelligence officers echoed that uncertainty, privately offering concerns about the Afghan abilities. But they still predicted that a complete Taliban takeover was not likely for at least 18 months. One senior administration official, discussing classified intelligence information that had been presented to Biden, said there was no sense that the Taliban were on the march.
In fact, they were. Across Afghanistan, the Taliban were methodically gathering strength by threatening tribal leaders in every community they entered with warnings to surrender or die. They collected weapons, ammunition, volunteers and money as they stormed from town to town, province to province.
In May, they opened a major offensive in Helmand province in the south and six other areas of Afghanistan, including Ghazni and Kandahar. In Washington, refugee groups grew increasingly alarmed by what was happening on the ground and feared Taliban retribution against thousands of translators, interpreters and others who had helped the American war effort.
Leaders of the groups estimated that as many as 100,000 Afghans and family members were now targets for Taliban revenge. On May 6, representatives from several of the largest U.S. refugee groups, including Human Rights First, the International Refugee Assistance Project, No One Left Behind and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service logged onto Zoom for a call with National Security Council staff members.
The groups pleaded with the White House officials for a mass evacuation of Afghans and urged them not to rely on a backlogged special visa program that could keep Afghans waiting for months or years.
The State Department sped up its efforts to process visas and clear the backlog. Officials overhauled the lengthy screening and vetting process and reduced processing time — but only to under a year. Eventually, they issued more than 5,600 special visas from April to July, the largest number in the program’s history but still a fraction of the demand.
The Taliban continued their advance as the embassy in Kabul urged Americans to leave. On April 27, the embassy had ordered nearly 3,000 members of its staff to depart, and on May 15, officials there sent the latest in a series of warnings to Americans in the country: “U.S. Embassy strongly suggests that U.S. citizens make plans to leave Afghanistan as soon as possible.”
TENSE MEETING
On June 25, Ghani met with Biden at the White House for what would become for the foreseeable future the last meeting between an American president and the Afghan leaders they had coaxed, cajoled and argued with over 20 years.
When the cameras were on at the beginning of the meeting, Ghani and Biden expressed mutual admiration even though Ghani was fuming about the decision to pull out U.S. troops. As soon as reporters were shooed out of the room, the tension was clear.
Ghani, a former World Bank official whom Biden regarded as stubborn and arrogant, had three requests, according to an official familiar with the conversation. He wanted the U.S. to be “conservative” in granting exit visas to the interpreters and others, and “low key” about their leaving the country so it would not look as if America lacked faith in his government.
He also wanted to speed up security assistance and secure an agreement for the U.S. military to continue to conduct airstrikes and provide overwatch from its planes and helicopters for his troops fighting the Taliban.
U.S. officials feared that the more they were drawn into direct combat with the militant group, the more its fighters would treat U.S. diplomats as targets.
Biden agreed to provide the air support and not to make a public show of the Afghan evacuations.
Biden had his own request for Ghani. The Afghan forces were stretched too thin, Biden told him, and should not try to fight everywhere. He repeated American advice that Ghani consolidate Afghan forces around key locations, but Ghani never took it.
Pressed in the coming days about news from Afghanistan that the U.S. had abandoned Bagram Airfield, with little to no notice to the Afghans, Biden, visibly annoyed, said it was “a rational drawdown with our allies, so there’s nothing unusual about it.”
“I think they have the capacity to be able to sustain the government,” he said, although he added that there would have to be negotiations with the Taliban.
Then, for the first time, he was pressed on what the administration would do to save Kabul if it came under direct attack. “I want to talk about happy things, man,” he said, referring to job growth that Biden attributed to his recovery plan. He insisted there was a plan.
“We have worked out an over-the-horizon capacity,” he said, meaning the administration had contingency plans should things go badly.
“But the Afghans are going to have to be able to do it themselves with the air force they have, which we’re helping them maintain,” he said. But by then, most of the U.S. contractors who helped keep the Afghan planes flying had been withdrawn from Bagram along with the troops.
By July 8, nearly all U.S. forces were out of Afghanistan as the Taliban continued their surge across the country. In a speech that day from the White House defending his decision to leave, Biden was in a bind trying to express skepticism about the abilities of the Afghan forces while being careful not to undermine the government. Afterward, he angrily responded to a reporter’s comparison to Vietnam by insisting that “there’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”
REFUGEE OPERATION
But five days later, nearly two dozen U.S. diplomats, all in the Kabul embassy, sent a memo directly to Blinken through the State Department’s “dissent” channel. The cable, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, urged that evacuation flights for Afghans begin in two weeks and that the administration move faster to register them for visas.
The next day, in a move already underway, the White House named a stepped-up effort “Operation Allies Refuge.”
By the end of July, Austin was concerned enough to order the expeditionary unit on the amphibious assault ship Iwo Jima in the Gulf of Oman — about 2,000 Marines — to disembark and wait in Kuwait so that they could reach Afghanistan quickly.
By Aug. 3, top national-security officials met in Washington and heard an updated intelligence assessment: Districts and provincial capitals across Afghanistan were falling rapidly to the Taliban and the Afghan government could collapse in “days or weeks.” It was not the most likely outcome, but it was an increasingly plausible one.
“We’re assisting the government so that the Talibs do not think this is going to be a cakewalk, that they can conquer and take over the country,” the chief U.S. envoy to Afghan peace talks, Zalmay Khalilzad, told the Aspen Security Forum on Aug. 3.
But by Aug. 6, the Pentagon was reviewing worst-case scenarios. If security further deteriorated, planning called for flying most of the embassy personnel out of the compound, and many out of the country, while a small core group of diplomats operated from a backup site at the airport.
By Aug. 11, the Taliban advances were so alarming that Biden asked his security advisers in the White House Situation Room if it was time to send the Marines to Kabul and to evacuate the embassy. He asked for an updated assessment of the situation and authorized the use of military planes for evacuating Afghan allies.
National-security officials were awakened as early as 4 a.m. Aug. 12 and told to gather for an urgent meeting a few hours later to provide options to the president. Once assembled, Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, told the group that the intelligence agencies could no longer ensure that they could provide sufficient warning if the capital was about to be under siege.
Everyone looked at one another, one participant said, and came to the same conclusion: It was time to get out. An hour later, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, walked into the Oval Office to deliver the group’s unanimous consensus to start an evacuation and deploy 3,000 Marines and Army soldiers to the airport.