That figure – which meant there was “roughly one consular officer for every 3,444 evacuees” – was one of several previously undisclosed details set out in the highly critical report examining the chaotic US withdrawal last August.
The report by Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which comes about a year after the fall of the nation’s capital to the Taliban, reveals further new details about the failure of the Biden administration to adequately plan and execute the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The report, a final draft of which was obtained by CNN, also said the administration did not accurately describe the nature of events on the ground and failed to put in place a plan to prevent the recruitment of American-trained Afghan commandos by America’s adversaries.
“Many of the Biden administration’s evacuation plans were made in the spring of 2021 — some even before the president announced retirement. And they were never updated despite the Taliban’s successes on the battlefield, despite the deteriorating security situation and despite revised intelligence assessments,” said Congressman Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
President Joe Biden announced in mid-April 2021 that the US would withdraw all remaining troops from Afghanistan by September 11 of that year – the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that started America’s war there. While Biden has long wanted to end U.S. involvement in the war in Afghanistan, he credited the decision in part to the deal struck with the Taliban by the Trump administration, which had a commitment to withdraw by May 1, 2021.
In the coming weeks and months, bipartisan lawmakers urged the administration to provide plans to protect Afghans who have worked for the U.S. during the nearly two-decade conflict, including evacuation options.
Both the State Department and the Pentagon have conducted their own reviews of the recall, but neither department has released any findings. The Pentagon review continues until the State Department concludes its own in March, according to a source familiar with the review. The delay in its release is due in part to an interagency review process layered with concerns about politics, optics and the effective application of lessons learned.
The House report found that as recently as mid-June 2021, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul held an Operational Planning Team (OPT) meeting with members of the U.S. military and U.S. diplomats focused on advance planning for noncombatant evacuation operations (NEO). The meeting was described by a US military officer involved as “the first time” the embassy began “looking at the NEO possibility”.
Due to the “complete lack of proper planning by the Biden administration,” there were consequences: evacuation flights were “taking off at only about 50% of their capacity” five days after the NEO, the report said. The report cited slow processing at the gates and chaos outside the gates — a government evacuation process so chaotic and disorderly that even Vice President Kamala Harris and First Lady Jill Biden’s staff contacted outside groups to try to get people out. they told the committee.
Evacuation flights carried mostly men
The report found that those who managed to get away on these evacuation flights were overwhelmingly men, despite concerns that had already been confirmed that women were being deprived of their freedoms when the Taliban took over.
“We now know through data from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Homeland Security that only approximately 25 percent of the evacuees during the NEO in Afghanistan were women or girls. To put this figure into context, women and girls historically account for more than half of emergency refugee flows,” Ambassador Kelly Curry, senior ambassador for the State Department’s Office of Global Women’s Issues under the Trump administration, wrote in the report.
When Kabul fell and then-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, two senior American officials—Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, then head of US Central Command, and Zalmay Khalilzad, then special representative for Afghanistan, who brokered the US-Taliban deal under Trump – met with Taliban representatives in Doha, where the militant group offered the US control on the security of the capital.
McKenzie testified that he rejected the offer, telling Congress in September 2021: “That was not why I was there, that was not my instruction, and we did not have the resources to undertake that mission.”
However, Khalilzad told the committee he thought “we could have considered it,” the report said. The former official also said the US had not ordered the Taliban to stay away from Kabul.
“We didn’t say ‘don’t go.’ We advised them to be careful,” Khalilzad said, according to the report. Meanwhile, US officials have repeatedly said the US supports peace talks between the Taliban and Ghani’s government.
Those who tried to flee the city were forced to fight the Taliban threat as they tried to reach the airport, where thousands gathered outside the gates in a desperate bid to get inside and board a flight. And in the early days of the evacuation, the operation at the airport was so badly managed that groups of Afghans managed to reach the runway and desperately tried to hold back the departing planes.
“Given that the administration had ceded control of Kabul to the Taliban, it was a very tactically challenging situation. But the decisions they made – or in some cases avoided making – led to this tactically challenging situation,” McCall said.
National Security Council spokesman Adrienne Watson said the report “is full of inaccuracies, selective information and false claims” and that it “advocates for an endless war and for sending even more American troops to Afghanistan.”
As this chaos unfolded, the report alleged that the administration “repeatedly misled the American public” by trying to downplay the grim situation on the ground and instead paint a picture of competence and progress.
The report juxtaposed comments by State Department officials with internal memos, such as one dated Aug. 20 that said at least seven Afghans “died while waiting at the access gates of HKIA (Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul) ” and that the Taliban “refuse to accept the remains” of the corpses that were being stored at the airport.
“At one point, State Department spokesman Ned Price was encouraging people to make their way to the airport and told the press that the evacuation was ‘effective and efficient,’ but the airport gates were closed and internal memos said there were many dead bodies at the airport and they don’t know how to deal with all of them,” McCall said.
Biden’s administrator declined to participate
The committee requested transcribed interviews with more than 30 administration officials, but the Biden administration declined to participate. For the report, the commission relied on interviews and information from whistleblowers, conversations with people who were in Kabul during the withdrawal, and fact-finding trips to the region.
The State Department has rejected the idea that it has failed to comply with congressional oversight efforts.
“We have provided more than 150 briefings to members and staff on post-NEO Afghanistan, covering a wide range of topics — including withdrawal, women and girls, relocation operations, counterterrorism and talks with the Taliban,” a State Department spokesman said, adding that the state Secretary Anthony Blinken has testified at two hearings on Afghanistan.
Republicans leading that investigation are a minority, meaning they don’t have subpoena power, but they have indicated they would issue subpoenas and continue to investigate the impeachment if their party takes the House in elections this year. They call this an interim report.
The report also said the administration failed — even months after the withdrawal — to take steps to prevent American-trained Afghan commandos from being recruited by US adversaries such as Iran, China or Russia.
“The U.S. government did evacuate about 600 Afghan security forces, who assisted the evacuation by providing perimeter security and other functions, but they represent a very small fraction of the U.S.-trained units that fought alongside U.S. troops.” And even those lucky enough to be flown out have found themselves stranded in third countries,” the report said, adding that 3,000 Afghan security forces had fled to Iran, according to a SIGAR report earlier this year.
As of July, the Biden administration still had no plan to prioritize the evacuation of those Afghans from the region, with the State Department awaiting a policy decision from the NSC, the report said.
CLARIFICATION: This story has been updated to reflect the report’s expected release date.
This story has also been updated with additional reporting.
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