The White House mounted a vehement defense Thursday of President Biden’s decision-making in Afghanistan, seeking to put a shine on the calamitous withdrawal in August 2021 as the Pentagon and State Department sent classified reports to Congress detailing the failures.
Administration officials placed heavy blame on President Trump for setting the withdrawal into motion and on Afghanistan itself. They said the nation’s military wasn’t trained, its government wasn’t competent and its people were too ready to capitulate.
The White House said Mr. Biden deserves credit for carrying out the withdrawal after 20 years of war. It said the president made the best choices possible and couldn’t have foreseen how quickly the Taliban would defeat Afghan forces without U.S. backing.
“President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor,” the National Security Council said in its 12-page report.
Officials said the U.S. is better off after the withdrawal. They said Mr. Biden would not have been able to lead a coalition supporting Ukraine against Russia’s invasion if the U.S. were still committed to Afghanistan.
“When the president made the decision to leave Afghanistan, some worried that doing so could weaken our alliances or put the United States at a disadvantage on the global stage. The opposite has happened,” the White House said.
“On the global stage, America is leading. We have rallied our allies and partners to support Ukraine and hold Russia accountable for its aggression — and to rise to compete with China. It is hard to imagine the United States would have been able to lead the response to these challenges as successfully — especially in the resource-intensive way that it has — if U.S. forces remained in Afghanistan today.”
The White House summary was met with disbelief from Republican lawmakers, who said the withdrawal was a signal of weakness that set Russian President Vladimir Putin on a course to invade Ukraine and emboldened Chinese President Xi Jinping’s more aggressive approach astride the world.
“Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, our Middle East partners’ outreach to Beijing and Xi’s increased threats to Taiwan are all connected to and arise from this debacle,” said Sen. James E. Risch of Idaho, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Rep. Michael McCaul, Texas Republican and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the White House’s shifting of blame was “disgraceful and insulting.”
“President Biden made the decision to withdraw and even picked the exact date. He is responsible for the massive failures in planning and execution,” he said.
Republicans said they would scour the two classified after-action reports by the State and Defense departments to get an accurate picture of what happened.
The White House released its 12-page summary to shape the narrative ahead of that process. It said Mr. Biden’s hands were tied by the time he took office.
The report details decisions by the Trump administration, including a series of drawdowns, negotiations with the Taliban and public pronouncements that the U.S. would withdraw, which left the U.S. weakened in Afghanistan.
“President Biden’s choice was stark: either withdrawal of our forces or resume fighting with the Taliban. He chose the former,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said at the White House as he released the report.
The White House said Mr. Biden did what he could to head off problems, including “planning for all contingencies,” though the report did not address internal warnings that a swift collapse would result.
Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, former chief of U.S. Central Command, has said he advised Mr. Biden against withdrawing. He said the Pentagon made clear to the White House that a full withdrawal almost surely would lead to a rapid Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.
In July 2021, 23 staffers stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul sent a cable via the State Department’s dissent channel warning of the Taliban’s rapid advance and potential collapse of the Afghan National Security Forces. The cable called for the Biden administration to increase evacuation efforts to get as many people as possible out of the country.
The White House didn’t order the unprecedented airlift until Aug. 14, a day before Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country.
The White House report defended the decision to delay an evacuation because of the risk of sparking the very collapse that resulted.
“Whenever a government is threatened by the prospect of collapse — whether in Afghanistan or elsewhere — there is an obvious tension between signaling confidence in the capabilities of the current government and providing warning of the risks that it might fail,” the White House said.
The balance Mr. Biden struck was to deliver what officials called “unprecedentedly extensive” phone calls to Americans and Afghan “partners” alerting them to the risk of a total collapse. They figured that they could urge people toward the exit without igniting the full-scale airlift.
The White House said the speed of the Taliban takeover caught everyone by surprise.
Twenty months later, 175 American citizens looking to leave are still stuck in Afghanistan. Some are being held captive by the Taliban.
Thousands of Afghans who should have been rescued remain stuck abroad, and thousands with no ties to the U.S. war effort managed to make it to the American airlift.
The White House blamed the Trump administration for failing to help Afghan war allies earlier. Officials said they found a backlog of 18,000 Afghans in the pipeline for the special visa carved out for those who risked their lives to assist the U.S. military.
The White House said the lessons it learned from Afghanistan have helped in other situations, such as handling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The cautious approach taken toward warning the Afghan government about its precarious position was tossed in favor of an aggressive approach toward Russia, with early warnings about Mr. Putin’s aims and game plan.
The White House said that enabled a more seamless evacuation of Americans from Ukraine.
The report was largely a restatement of the Biden administration’s arguments in autumn 2021 and didn’t grapple with subsequent developments and revelations.
Among those was testimony that the Republican-led House heard this year from a Marine who said he had identified and was ready to take down the male suicide bomber who went on to kill 13 Americans and 170 Afghans outside of Abbey Gate at the airport in Kabul. The Marine said he was ordered not to take the shot.
The White House also glossed over repeated findings by government auditors faulting the airlift. One inspector general found that dozens of Afghans who posed potential national security risks were allowed to reach the U.S. Another said the resettlement efforts fell short, leaving Afghans unprepared for life in the U.S.
One report this week said some Afghans spewed racism and sexism at the very caseworkers assigned to help them.
• Joseph Clark can be reached at jclark@washingtontimes.com.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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