The President Joe Biden-led administration of the United States has come out to defend its decision to pull American troops out of Afghanistan but said the 2021 withdrawal highlighted that Washington must better prepare for ‘high-risk scenarios’ in the future.
In a summary report which was published on Thursday, United States government agencies involved in the pullout blamed former President Donald Trump’s administration for issues that led to the chaotic US exit from the country.
‘President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor,’ it read.
The Trump administration had negotiated a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban that Biden pledged to honour. But Thursday’s review criticised the former Republican president for a lack of planning to carry out the deal.
‘During the transition from the Trump administration to the Biden administration, the outgoing administration provided no plans for how to conduct the final withdrawal or to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies,‘ the report said.
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“Indeed, there were no such plans in place when President Biden came into office, even with the agreed upon full withdrawal just over three months away.”
The internationally backed Afghan government collapsed and then-President Ashraf Ghani fled the country in August 2021 as the Taliban took over the capital, Kabul, amid the withdrawal of US forces.
American troops – confined to the area around the city’s airport until their final withdrawal at the end of that month – oversaw a massive, two-week operation to get desperate Afghans out.
During the evacuation, a suicide bombing by the Afghanistan branch of ISIL (ISIS) killed at least 175 people, including 13 US service members.
While Thursday’s report did not explicitly acknowledge mistakes by the Biden administration during the withdrawal, it said the US learned to prepare early for evacuations and worst-case scenarios.
White House national security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters that the US government could not have predicted that Afghan forces would ‘fail to fight for the country’ after 20 years of American support.
‘Another lesson learned was the need to plan early and extensively for the low-probability, high-risk scenarios,’ Kirby said during a news conference.
Similarly, the report said the US now prioritises “earlier evacuations when faced with a degrading security situation”.
Kirby also slammed the Trump administration for negotiating a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban that he said excluded the Afghan government.
He said Trump ‘negotiated the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners that were being held by the Ghani government without consultation with the Ghani government’.
Meanwhile, Trump rejected the findings of the report on Thursday. ‘I watched this disaster unfold just like everyone else,’ he said on his Truth Social platform. “Biden is responsible, no one else!”
Despite criticism of the Trump administration, which initiated the American withdrawal after 20 years in Afghanistan, the report said Biden – who took office in January 2021 – also wanted to end the longest war in US history.