Friday night document dump: Afghanistan pullout a huge failure, State Department report says

Slipped out under the radar ahead of a long Fourth of July weekend on a Friday night, the State Department's report on the U.S. pullout on Afghanistan in 2021 is out, and it's a beaut.

According to CBS:

Washington — The State Department released on Friday an unclassified version of its Afghanistan "After Action Review" report, which faulted both the Trump and Biden administrations for "insufficient" planning and said a lack of clear communication and decision-making "added significantly" to the challenges U.S. personnel faced during the frenzied, and ultimately deadly, military withdrawal and evacuation from Kabul in 2021. 

Commissioned by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the review was completed last year and follows an earlier White House report that was released in April. A Pentagon review remains classified.  

Which is kind of ridiculous to blame on President Trump. After all, since when has Joe Biden ever followed through on a Trump plan of action? Just ask the folks at the border who know all about those Biden recissions of Trump's executive orders. The bi-partisan assessment of blame was intended to put on a fig leaf of 'even-handedness.'

But the specifics of the blame on the Biden side of things is where all the 'damning' information is:

According to CNN:

The State Department’s report contains much sharper criticism around the Biden administration’s actions than the White House summary document released in April. That document blamed the Trump administration’s decisions for creating the conditions that led to the chaos of the evacuation, and did not overtly admit any mistakes.

The report noted that “when the Trump administration left office, key questions remained unanswered about how the United States would meet the May 2021 deadline for a full military withdrawal, how the United States could maintain a diplomatic presence in Kabul after that withdrawal, and what might happen to those eligible for the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program as well as other at-risk Afghans.”

Once Biden decided in April 2021 to proceed with full withdrawal, with a new deadline of September 11, 2021, the subsequent speed of the US military’s “retrograde” from Afghanistan “compounded the difficulties the Department faced in mitigating the loss of the military’s key enablers,” it stated.

“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),” the report stated.

Shifting orders and a ridiculous belief that the Taliban would never create a worst-case scenario as happened, along with nobody in charge made the disastrous pullout a living reality:

 “U.S. military planning for a possible NEO had been underway with post for some time, but the Department’s participation in the NEO planning process was hindered by the fact that it was unclear who in the Department had the lead,” the review found.

..and this...

According to the review, “crisis preparation and planning were inhibited to a degree by concerns about the signals that might be sent, especially anything that might suggest the United States had lost confidence in the Afghan government and thus contribute to its collapse,” which it did in mid-August 2021.

Although the State Department established an Afghanistan Coordination Task Force, “it failed to establish a broader task force as the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated in late July and early August 2021.”

“Naming a 7th Floor principal to oversee all elements of the crisis response would have improved coordination across different lines of effort,” the report stated, referencing the floor of the State Department where senior officials’ offices are located.

As usual, the Biden administration was concerned about 'optics' - to the very point of putting American lives at danger, leaving some ten thousand allies behind, flying in more than ten thousand Afghani illegals with no right to be here, and ruining American prestige abroad as China cleaned up in Iraq on its oil, and Russia launched plans to invade Ukraine.  Note the Jimmy Carteresque reasoning on failing to make plans because they didn't want to send any signals suggesting that they could imagine any problems post-pullout ... so, they didn't plan for any problems, either.

These things are on Biden, and the complete failure to plan for problems during the pullout. Biden further completed the public-relations focus on the disaster by hiding from the public at Camp David while the disaster was unfolding, while Secretary of State Antony Blinken had more important business to take care of in the Hamptons as U.S. troops were losing their lives to a suicide bomber and American standing abroad was crashing and burning.

Asked what took them so long to get this report out, CNN noted these responses from the Biden administration:

A senior State Department official did not explain why it had taken so long for the report to be published, nor why it was released before a holiday weekend, saying they would not discuss questions related to “process.”

Asked about the report on Friday and whether he admitted there were “mistakes during the withdrawal,” Biden noted that he had vowed that al Qaeda “wouldn’t be there.”

“I said we’d get help from the Taliban,” the president said in response to the shouted question after remarks at the White House. “I was right.”

US intelligence assessment last August found that al Qaeda had not reconstituted in Afghanistan following the US withdrawal.

A senior official suddenly being concerned about process issues, when obviously, the delay was to keep the residue of this bad news from reaching Joe Biden's poll numbers? Once again, the old public relations priority seems paramount.

And Biden himself's response was little more than a yawp, taking credit for al-Qaida not being there in Afghanistan in any powerful capacity, when the fact is, the bad guys have moved onto other groups -- such as ISIS, or the great migrant armies now wreaking mass havoc in France, and now Belgium and Switzerland, according to reports. Who needs al-Qaida when you can go burn libraries and release zoo animals with the migrant mobs in Paris?

In short, there was no appetite among the Bidenites for taking any responsibility, and thus far, nobody fired for incompetence either.

That of course, would lead straight to Joe Biden himself, and we already know he never takes responsibility.

It's ugly stuff, and no surprise that they tried to hide it. The report, available here, is the unclassified 25-page mini-version, with 60 pages redacted. Who knows how bad those missing 60 pages must read if all we are getting is the sanitized version?

Image: Screen shot from NBC News video, via YouTube

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