That leads us to the other major miss in the report. The chaos of those last two weeks of August and the sudden evacuation happened precisely because two weeks before the withdrawal date, Kabul and, with it, Afghanistan fell to the Taliban — something that the U.S. government had not anticipated would happen before its withdrawal was complete. It is not enough to acknowledge that the intelligence community got it wrong, as the report does. The questions the administration is asking and trying to answer are simply too narrow. There needs to be a deeper effort by the administration that ultimately withdrew from Afghanistan to reckon with the 20 years of war there and why America’s effort to build up the Afghan army and government failed in the end.
One key question that the Biden administration should ask is what the complete dependence of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) on U.S. air, logistical, and intelligence support meant for its (in)ability to function as the United States withdrew that support early that summer. Could that have been anticipated and prevented? There are broader questions too, on the type of training the ANDSF received, the cause of the ultimate hollowness of the Afghan government that collapsed (and fled the country) as the Taliban reached the gates of Kabul, and the steps taken by successive U.S. administrations that contributed to these failures. Pointing to the work of theAfghanistan War Commission, as the administration has done, won’t suffice.
The administration’sreport, in the end, discusses the massive evacuation effort that started on August 14, once the Non-Combatant Evacuation Operation was finally triggered. “The largest airlift conducted in U.S. history,” which included 70,000 vulnerable Afghans, was a massive and commendable effort, to be sure. However, it only worked because of the help of the civil society and veterans groups that rapidly organized and worked around the clock in the United States to assist it. The Biden administration acknowledged them in the report — but not that they were forced to step in because the administration wasn’t prepared for an evacuation of this scale. It is an effort veterans have called “gutting.”
One line stood out during the April 6briefingaccompanying the report’s release: Kirby said, “For all this talk of chaos, I just didn’t see it, not from my perch.” The problem with that statement is that the rest of the world did — and the scenes at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, those images of desperate Afghans clinging to airplanes even as they took off, will not soon be forgotten. Neither will thewrenching congressional testimonyof a U.S. Marine, who, between tears, used one word to describe those two weeks: “catastrophe.” A catastrophe for which no one has been held accountable.
