A new State Department report places blame for the disastrous US withdrawal from Afghanistan on the Biden administration, saying it should have listened to concerns that the Afghan government would fall to the Taliban before the last American troops left Kabul — and been ready for that possibility.
The report, released Friday afternoon as much of official Washington prepared for the July 4 holiday weekend, suggests that the State Department was not prepared to conduct the enormous task of processing more than 125,000 evacuees at once because diplomatic personnel were directed to “continue embassy operations … in the belief that the security situation would not deteriorate substantially in Kabul for several months at the earliest.”
Meanwhile, military officials had made their own plans to conduct such a mammoth humanitarian operation, but the State Department said its own involvement was hampered because “it was unclear who in the Department had the lead.”
“As the Taliban’s territorial gains continued during the early summer of 2021, there was increasing alarm in many circles that led to calls for more urgent preparations for an evacuation, if not the launch of an evacuation itself,” the report said.
But the Biden administration ignored such concerns, and “seemed to rely on received assurances that the [Afghan] government and its security forces would concentrate on the defense of Kabul and believed that they could hold the Taliban at bay for some time.”
