The study repeatedly blames the governments of former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden for their actions before and after the departure of US forces from Kabul in August 2021. The United States evacuated some 124,000 Afghans from the country.
For their part, the Republicans accused Biden of not assuming responsibility for intelligence failures before the Taliban took power and for the scenes of chaos at the Kabul airport, where 13 US troops and some 170 Afghans died in attacks. committed by suicide bombers.
Biden was defiant when asked on Friday if he would admit that the United States made mistakes before and during his withdrawal.
”Remember what I said about Afghanistan? I said al Qaeda would not be there,” Biden said. “I said we would get help from the Taliban. What is happening now? What’s going on? Read the press. I was right”.
In July 2022, the United States killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri in a drone strike on his Kabul home, as part of what the Biden administration views as a capability to attack the group after the withdrawal. But a team of United Nations observers reported in May that al Qaeda considers Afghanistan “a safe haven” and that the Taliban had failed to honor its previous anti-terrorism commitments.
“Al Qaeda maintains a low-key presence, focusing on using the country as an ideological and logistical hub to mobilize and recruit new fighters, while covertly rebuilding its capacity for foreign operations,” the observers said in their report.
According to Friday’s report, a State Department task force helped bring in nearly 2,000 Afghan citizens in July and early August, weeks before the US withdrawal deadline of August 31, 2021. Those Afghans were able to access to processing under a US visa program for them.
However, the State Department “failed to establish a broader task force as the situation deteriorated in Afghanistan,” the report states.
And when the military was planning the evacuation of American civilians and Afghan allies, “it was not clear who was leading it in the department,” he added.
“The decisions by both President Trump and President Biden to end the United States military mission in Afghanistan had serious consequences for the viability and security of the Afghan government,” according to the document. “Those decisions are outside the scope of this review, but the (review) team found that during both administrations there was not enough high-level consideration of worst-case scenarios and how quickly they could occur.”
According to the report, as the Taliban seized cities much faster than most US officials expected and the fate of Kabul became uncertain, State Department staff began receiving an “overwhelming volume of calls and messages ” from lawmakers, other government agencies and the general public, asking for help to save people trapped in the country.
Personnel working to facilitate the evacuation also faced confusing guidelines that did not match actual conditions at the time, the report added.
The State Department has taken into account lessons learned from failures in Afghanistan when evacuating people before and during the war in Ukraine and as a crisis unfolded in Sudan, according to a senior State Department official who reported to journalists on Friday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in adherence to the basic rules established by the agency.
FUENTE: Associated Press
