A report released today by the State Department details bureaucratic failures associated with the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal and asserts that the decisions of both the Trump and Biden administrations had “serious consequences for the viability of the Afghan government and its security.”
According to the After Action Review, “there was insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios and how quickly those might follow.” Both the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul also showed a lack of urgency in planning for a possible collapse of the Afghan government, the report says.
Republicans have already launched inquiries into the Biden administration’s handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal. The report’s being released on the eve of a holiday weekend could exacerbate frustrations with the administration about how forthright it has been.
The administration released a summary of the After Action Review in April. The summary blamed the chaos of the withdrawal on the Trump administration.
However, the report released Friday is openly critical of both administrations. The gap between the summary and the actual report appears to vindicate House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul (R., Texas), who expressed his concern in May that summaries from the State Department are a poor substitute for the original material.
According to the report, a concern about signaling a loss of confidence in the government of Ashraf Ghani impeded preparations for a worst-case scenario. The report says that while these concerns were not illegitimate, the State Department now recognizes the need “to insulate worst-case contingency planning and preparations from political concerns.”
The best indicator of the lack of urgency among officials, says the report, was the decision to proceed with a normal rotation of Kabul embassy personnel. Typically, foreign-service tours are one-year assignments. However, given the extraordinary circumstances, the department could have suspended the rotation process. It did not, and many officers who had served and gained invaluable experience between 2020 and 2021 departed in late July and early August of 2021, in the midst of the withdrawal.
“Key crisis leadership positions like the Senior Regional Security Officer and the head of the Consular Section, had arrived only weeks and in some cases days before the Taliban entered Kabul,” reads the report.
When the Trump administration left office, key questions about how the U.S. would meet the negotiated withdrawal deadline of May 2021 remained unanswered. When the Biden administration took over, the report said, it decided on a new deadline in September 2021, “but the speed of that retrograde compounded the difficulties the Department faced in mitigating the loss of the military’s key enablers.”
“Critically, the decision to hand over Bagram Air Base to the Afghan government meant that Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) would be the only avenue for a possible noncombatant evacuation operation (NEO),” read the report.
Planning for the evacuation was underway for some time, but the State Department’s participation in that planning “was hindered by the fact that it was unclear who in the Department had the lead.”
“Coordination with DoD worked better on the ground in Kabul,” reads the report.
Clarity on staffing was a systemic problem. There were prolonged gaps in filling senior domestic or chief-of-mission positions overseas. The position of assistant secretary for South and Central Asian affairs offers a case in point, the report says. Additionally, “naming a 7th Floor principal to oversee all elements of the crisis response would have improved coordination across different lines of effort,” the report says, referring to the State Department floor where senior officials have their offices.
Knowledge management and communication within department task forces was problematic, the report says, and so too was staffing the task forces.
“Constantly changing policy guidance and public messaging from Washington regarding which populations were eligible for relocation . . . added to the confusion and often failed to take into account key facts on the ground,” says the report, adding that “senior administration officials had not made clear decisions regarding the universe of at-risk Afghans who would be included by the time the operation started nor had they determined where those Afghans would be taken.”
The department also struggled to deal with inquiries from government agencies, Congress, and the public about individual cases of at-risk Afghans. There was a lack of a centralized case-management system to track and collate inquiries, according to the report.
“The Department proved unable to buffer those on the ground in Kabul from receiving multiple, direct calls and messages from current or former senior officials, members of Congress, and/or prominent private citizens asking and in some cases demanding that they provide assistance to specific at-risk Afghans. Responding to such demands often placed Department employees at even greater risk and hindered the effort to move larger groups of people out,” the report says.
At the Kabul embassy and also in Washington, Covid lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 undercut operational capacity, reducing opportunities to collaborate and plan.
A key recommendation of the report for future crises identifies “the need to plan better for worst-case scenarios, to rebuild and strengthen the Department’s core crisis management capabilities, and to ensure that senior officials hear the broadest possible range of views including those that challenge operating assumptions or question the wisdom of key policy decisions.”
The report did not critique the circumstances surrounding the attack on Abbey Gate on August 26, 2021, which left 13 service members dead and many more injured. At least 170 Afghans were also killed.
In March, Marine Corps sniper Tyler Vargas-Andrews, who was catastrophically injured in the bombing, testified before McCaul’s committee. He said he and others spotted the suspected suicide bomber based on intelligence provided to them and requested permission to engage. They never received the go-ahead.
“Eventually the individual disappeared. To this day, we believe he was the suicide bomber. Plain and simple, we were ignored,” Vargas-Andrews said. “Our expertise was disregarded. No one was held accountable for our safety.”
House Republicans are demanding answers from the Pentagon regarding the incident, including a detailed description of the response to the Marines’ request for engagement.