A State Department report released Friday finds fault with the Biden administration’s crisis management and awareness before and during the fall of Afghanistan.
The report, the unredacted version of which is 21 pages, is sharply critical of the U.S. government’s handling of the most serious evacuation crisis since the fall of Saigon. The problems ranged from the very top — a failure of former president Donald Trump and President Biden to appreciate the consequence of a U.S. military pullout on the stability of the Afghan government — to the low-level, as standard summer diplomatic rotations in the weeks ahead of the collapse of Kabul left the U.S.
Among its findings was that although the U.S. military began planning for a full evacuation of Kabul “for some time” ahead of when it started in mid-August 2021, the State Department’s participation in the planning “was hindered by the fact that it was unclear who in the Department had the lead.” The evacuation began with the U.S. military rushing thousands of troops back to Kabul after recently withdrawing all but a few hundred of them. In a hastily arranged and shaky agreement, Taliban forces – long a U.S. battlefield adversary – provided security outside the airport while U.S. troops oversaw the airfield itself and attempted to make sense of who deserved to flee.
Vasely’s comments, and other similar remarks, were downplayed by State Department officials in February 2022 after they were initially released through the Freedom of Information Act to The Washington Post. Jalina Porter, a State Department spokeswoman, said then that “cherry-picked comments do not reflect the months of work that were well underway” and the totality of what U.S. diplomats undertook to facilitate the evacuation effort.
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