State Department publishes report on chaotic departure from Afghanistan

The State Department needs to better plan for worst-case scenarios, strengthen its crisis management capabilities and ensure top officials hear “the widest possible range of opinions,” including those who question their assumptions and decisions.

Those were some of the key findings of a State Department review of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, which contributed to the sudden collapse of the Afghan government and required a massive airlift to evacuate some 1,250,000 US citizens. and save Afghans who had helped the United States.

The report does not place the blame on any specific person and mentions Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken only in passing. It does say that the department’s participation in an executive’s planning for an evacuation was “hampered by the fact that it was unclear who in the department was in charge.”

The 87-page report — less than half of which was released publicly on Friday because much of it is classified — points to several factors largely beyond the Biden administration’s control as to the reason for the chaos that followed the collapse of the government and does not directly condemn the Biden administration.

It says, as Biden officials have done many times before, that the coronavirus pandemic severely limited operations at the US embassy in the months leading up to the withdrawal, making it difficult to process special US visas for Afghans entering the country. hoped to lead before the Taliban left. . It also suggested that the Trump administration had committed to withdrawing troops from Afghanistan after a 20-year occupation without planning how the United States could maintain a diplomatic presence in the country and what to do with the tens of thousands of Afghans who, fearing for the Taliban, reprisals, who had applied for special visas.

It also reiterates Mr Blinken’s and others’ claims that few US officials anticipated how quickly the Afghan military and government would collapse.

“That said,” it adds, “as security conditions in Afghanistan worsened, some argued for more urgency in planning for a possible collapse.” In mid-July, nearly two dozen US diplomats in Kabul sent a memo through the department’s “divergent” channel urging that evacuation flights for Afghans begin in two weeks and that the administration move more quickly to register them for visas.

Mr. Blinken ordered the review shortly after the US exit from Afghanistan. .

The report’s rollout had clear hallmarks of a calculated effort to dampen its public impact. It was released on the Friday afternoon prior to the July 4 holiday as many in Washington began vacation, and a background briefing for State Department reporters began minutes after the report was distributed to them, limiting their ability to ask detailed questions. comment on the findings was limited. .