The widely-criticized pullout left 13 service members dead, billions of dollars’ worth of equipment behind, and a U.S.-backed government overrun by the Taliban.
“President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor,” the report reads.
It also states that Trump equivocated often in communicating an Afghanistan policy, at one point calling for an immediate withdrawal of all troops before agreeing to bolster the 10,000-member force by 3,000 in mid-2018 and then ordering drawdowns that by fall 2020 reduced U.S. military presence to 2,500 in accordance with a pact worked out in “direct talks with the Taliban” that Trump initiated “without consulting with our allies and partners or allowing the Afghan government at the negotiating table.”
“In September 2019, President Trump emboldened the Taliban by publicly considering inviting them to Camp David on the anniversary of 9/11,” the report reads. “In February 2020, the United States and the Taliban reached a deal, known as the Doha Agreement, under which the United States agreed to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by May 2021.”
The lethal chaos in Kabul, Afghanistan, as the United States withdrew its forces was a lingering effect of Trump’s chaotic Afghan policy as exemplified in the Doha Agreement, which the Biden administration states in the report was a bad deal that the Pentagon never understood how to implement.
“As part of the deal, President Trump also pressured the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban fighters from prison, including senior war commanders, without securing the release of the only American hostage known to be held by the Taliban,” the report reads.
The report states that the discord between the administration and the Department of Defense was so exacerbated that the Pentagon was taken by surprise when Trump posted on Twitter in November 2020 that the remaining U.S. troops in Afghanistan should be “home by Christmas!” and issued a directive to withdraw all forces from Afghanistan no later than Jan. 15, 2021.
“One week later, that order was rescinded and replaced with one to draw down to 2,500 troops by the same date,” the report reads in documenting a series of contradictory orders and statements regarding Afghanistan coming from Trump and his administration.
“During the transition from the Trump administration to the Biden administration, the outgoing administration provided no plans for how to conduct the final withdrawal or to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies. Indeed, there were no such plans in place when President Biden came into office, even with the agreed upon full withdrawal just over three months away.”
‘They Weren’t Sharing’
In an April 6 media briefing, National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby said members of Biden’s transition team reached out to Trump administration officials between November 2020 and January 2021 to discuss the details of the Doha Agreement and their May 2021 withdrawal plans.“There were multiple attempts to try to gain insight into what the previous team had been doing; none of those plans had been forthcoming,” he said. “It wasn’t for lack of trying. They weren’t sharing.”
Therefore, Kirby said, the Biden administration was “almost starting from scratch” in developing a plan to meet the conditions that the Trump administration had negotiated in the Doha Agreement.
“When Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021, the Taliban were in the strongest military position that they had been in since 2001, controlling or contesting nearly half of the country,” the report reads. At the same time, the new administration “was facing President Trump’s near-term deadline to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by May 2021, or the Taliban would resume its attacks on U.S. and allied troops.”
The report recounts that when Biden spoke with the Pentagon, he was “confronted with difficult realities left to him by the Trump administration” and reviewed options that didn’t offer any good outcomes: leave in accordance with the Doha Agreement or send more troops to Afghanistan.
Biden had campaigned on ending “the longest war in American history” and bringing U.S. troops home, but, the report states, he wouldn’t have negotiated directly with the Taliban and, essentially, withdrew “under these circumstances” that left U.S. forces with little capacity to control the environment in Kabul that resulted in the mayhem of the final departure.
The 12-page review provides extensive overviews of the administration’s actions and those by the Department of Defense, the State Department, and other federal agencies.
“As you all know, over these many months, departments and agencies key to the withdrawal conducted thorough internal after-action reviews, each of them examining their decision-making processes, as well as how those decisions were executed,” Kirby said. “Today, they are making those reviews available to relevant committees in the Senate and in the House, as previewed by Secretaries [of State and Defense] [Antony] Blinken and [Lloyd] Austin in testimony last month.”
‘A Complete Lie’
Former Trump administration Department of Defense Chief of Staff Kash Patel called the report’s claim that they failed to communicate with incoming Biden officials over the Afghanistan withdrawal “a complete lie.”Patel said that during the November 2020 to January 2021 transition, he and then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper “and so many others” reached out to incoming administration officials to discuss the Doha Agreement plan “in person, via email, relentlessly.”
“Half the time they wouldn’t take our calls,” he said.
Speaking with NTD, a media affiliate of The Epoch Times, he said the newly released report is “a whitewash ... to cover up for the tragic failures that led to the deaths of 13 American soldiers.”
Patel said Trump officials recommended that Bagram Airfield be shut down and “not to let the prisoners out of the jail cells at Bagram.”
“We told them not to let our special forces out of country, and we told them to keep our intelligence posture until all Americans were removed and a safe transition had been conducted,” he said. “But they ignored every single tactic and piece of intelligence we offered them.”
Patel called for an investigation into “the retrospective lie,” which he said “should be prosecuted by the Department of Justice for lying to the world and smearing the names of the 13 individuals that were killed because [the Biden administration] decided to drastically withdraw” rather than follow the Doha Agreement plan.
Kirby’s media briefing commentary was “another lie,” Patel said, calling Kirby “the spokes-liar for the commander-in-chief on this one” and claiming that Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, resisted withdrawal and engaged in “political operations ... to keep his job rather than to do his job.”
‘[The review’s] only intention is to lay blame falsely at the feet of the Trump administration, who were successfully utilizing President Trump’s orders on the diplomatic and operational channels to withdraw successfully,” he told NTD.
“And look at what happened under our withdrawal from Afghanistan ... not one American service member was killed during our withdrawal because we acted on the intelligence.”
Patel said the review also gives the Pentagon and Department of Defense cover for their “own fraudulent conduct,” which should also be investigated.
“The documentation speaks for itself. We gave them more access ... to more officials, to more documents, than ever before,” he said. “Maybe if they paid attention to the transition documents ... lives would not have been lost and this lie would not have to be told today.”
