Report on Afghanistan exit urges ‘worst case’ plans
WASHINGTON — The State Department should plan better for worst-case scenarios, strengthen its crisis-management capabilities and ensure that top officials hear “the broadest possible range of views,” including ones that challenge their assumptions and decisions.
Those were some of the key findings of a State Department review of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in summer 2021, which contributed to the sudden collapse of the Afghan government and required a massive airlift to rescue roughly 125,000 U.S. citizens and Afghans who had assisted the United States.
The review also portrayed a department that scrambled to respond to the crisis due to unfilled senior positions, unclear leadership on planning efforts and a shortage of seasoned diplomats in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.
The document addresses what even many Democrats call a foreign policy debacle for the Biden administration: its failure to more adequately prepare for the abrupt collapse of the Afghan state and avoid days of harrowing chaos in Kabul surrounding an emergency exit that included a terrorist bombing at the city’s airport that killed as many as 170 civilians and 13 U.S. troops.
The report does not pin blame on specific individuals and mentions Secretary of State Antony Blinken only in passing. But it does say that in both the Trump and Biden administrations, “there was insufficient seniorlevel consideration of worstcase scenarios and how quickly those might follow.”
Even after it became clear that the Taliban would capture Kabul, the report says, the department’s response featured confusion about responsibilities and authorities. Under Blinken, the State Department’s participation in executive branch planning for an evacuation “was hindered by the fact that it was unclear who in the department had the lead,” the report finds.
Another shortcoming: By the time the frantic airlift from Kabul began, top State Department officials “had not made clear decisions” regarding which Afghans would be eligible for evacuation, nor where they would be taken.
It also says that the department “failed” to establish a broad Afghanistan task force as the situation there deteriorated in late July and early August 2021, and that such a step “would have brought key players together to address issues related to a possible” mass evacuations.
At the same time, the 87-page report — less than half of which was publicly released Friday because much of it is classified — points to several factors largely beyond the Biden administration’s control to explain the chaos that followed the government’s collapse and does not directly condemn the Biden administration.
It says, as Biden officials have many times before, that the coronavirus pandemic severely limited operations at the U.S. Embassy in the months before the withdrawal, making it difficult to process special visas for Afghans hoping to leave the country before the Taliban’s return. The report also suggests that the Trump administration had committed to withdrawing troops from Afghanistan after a 20-year occupation without planning for how the United States might maintain a diplomatic presence in the country and what to do about the tens of thousands of Afghans who, fearing Taliban reprisals, had applied for those special visas.
The report repeats assertions made by Blinken and others that few U.S. officials had foreseen how quickly the Afghan military and government would collapse and notes that close observers “apparently including the Taliban itself ” agreed.
“That said,” it adds, “as security conditions in Afghanistan deteriorated, some argued for more urgency in planning for a possible collapse.”
In mid-July 2021, nearly two dozen Kabul-based U.S. diplomats sent Blinken a cable through the department’s “dissent” channel urging that evacuation flights for Afghans begin in two weeks and that the administration move faster to register them for visas.
That cable has become a focal point for congressional Republicans critical of the administration’s handling of the withdrawal. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, threatened to hold Blinken in contempt of Congress when he initially refused to provide the memo to his committee.
Blinken allowed McCaul to view the document in May but says he will not release it publicly to protect internal discussions within his department. McCaul has said the full committee should be able to see the cable — including the panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, who has also asked to read it. The issue remains unresolved.