A report released by the US State Department on Friday, as millions of Americans began to enjoy the bridge for the national Fourth of July holiday, acknowledges serious errors of forecasting during the chaotic withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, in the August 2021.
The decisions by both President Trump and President Biden to end the military mission in Afghanistan “had serious consequences for the viability of the Afghan government and its security,” the operational review team said two years ago. And he adds: “During the two administrations, there was a lack of sufficient high-level consideration of the worst-case scenarios” possible in the country and how “quickly” they could arise. There was a great unpredictability.
Despite the self-deprecating force of the report and the fact that it came from his State Department, Biden tried to give a defiant retort when asked if he would acknowledge the mistakes of the withdrawal: “Remember what I said ? I said al-Qaida would not be there. I said we would get help from the Taliban. And what is happening now? Reread the press. I was right”, said the president in what should be understood as a reaffirmation of the theses he maintained at the time to justify the departure.
In the document, the group responsible for reviewing what happened suggests major confusion in command before and during the August 2021 operation. The State Department’s planning for the evacuation “was stymied” due to the fact that “it was not clear who had the leadership” to make decisions.
The report implicitly points to the responsibility of the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken. The head of the Department – ??they argue – should have expanded his crisis management group when the Taliban advanced into the country that summer. A high-level diplomat was missing “to oversee all elements of the response to the crisis”, the text notes. And alluding to the Department floor where Blinken works with his main collaborators, he adds: “Appointing a director on the 7th floor would have improved coordination between the different fronts” involved in the action.
The release of the report, a still-classified portion of which has yet to be released, was a fresh blow to Biden on the same day that the Supreme Court struck down his student debt relief plan that is straining dozens of millions of Americans.
The US exit from Afghanistan, carried out for two weeks through just one airport in Kabul, made it possible to get more than 120,000 people out of the country in a meritorious and risky airlift mission. But tens of thousands of Afghans who had helped Washington for 20 years in the war against the Taliban were left on the ground, at the mercy of fanatics.
A suicide attack killed more than a hundred citizens of the country and 13 soldiers of the United States; a botched US military drone strike killed 10 innocent people, and many others were trampled to death in the race to get one of the planes that could take them away from the inferno.
Washington did not act very wisely. Now he admits it. Of course, in the middle of June.
