The White House admits to having made mistakes in withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. That is what the administration of President Joe Biden writes in a report, of which the summary published on Thursday. Former President Donald Trump is mainly held responsible for the chaos that arose around the withdrawal of the troops.
The government acknowledges in the report that the evacuation of Americans and American allies could have started earlier and could have been done more quickly. That did not happen because the government was too optimistic about the power of the Afghan government and the fighting spirit of the Afghan army. In the future, the White House wants to exchange intelligence sooner and more actively about risks in the event of “destabilizing security environments” such as Afghanistan.
Also read this analysis from the time: US appears powerless. Whose fault is the chaos in Afghanistan?
Yet the government does not take full responsibility. Biden would be “severely limited” in carrying out the troop withdrawal by agreements that his predecessor Trump had already made. Trump agreed the withdrawal with the Taliban a year earlier. According to the report, Biden then “inherited” a Taliban that hadn’t been this strong since 2021. Delaying withdrawal was not an option, according to the White House: “There were no signs that more time, more money or more Americans in Afghanistan would have resulted in a fundamentally different trajectory.”
In August 2021, the US military and all allies left Afghanistan after 20 years of presence. Although the Afghan army had been trained by the Americans for years, the capital Kabul fell to the Taliban two weeks before the formal withdrawal date. After that, the airport was overrun by Afghans who tried to flee the country and even clung to planes in desperation. On August 26, a suicide bombing at the airport killed 170 Afghans and thirteen American soldiers.
Also read the report of the chaotic evacuation in August 2021: ‘Take us. Take us. save our souls’