LONDON: The US-led evacuation from Afghanistan in August last year was unplanned and hampered by “chaos and confusion,” a new report has claimed.
A year after the airlift, which led to “tragic yet avoidable outcomes,” a 121-page report by Republicans in the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs has highlighted organizational failures that “led to 13 dead service members.”
The report claims that choices made by the Biden administration mean that “American lives are still at great risk, there are increased threats to our homeland security, tarnished standing abroad for years to come and emboldened enemies across the globe.”
Some of the most damaging findings in the report include data showing that almost 1,500 Afghan children were evacuated without their parents, and that only 36 US consular officers were in Kabul to process the more than 100,000 people seeking to escape the country.
A key failure was made in the run-up to the withdrawal, with the Biden administration lacking preparation, the report claims, arguing that officials waited until Taliban forces were outside Kabul before taking action. “Very little was done to prepare for a Taliban takeover of the country,” it said.
The Biden administration also “failed to make any effort to prioritize the evacuation of US-trained Afghan commandos and other elite units who possess sensitive knowledge about US military operations.”
At the time, US President Joe Biden hailed the evacuation as an “extraordinary success” that transported more than 124,000 Americans and Afghans to safety.
“We completed one of the biggest airlifts in history ... more than double what most experts thought were possible,” he said.
“No nation — no nation has ever done anything like it in all of history. Only the US had the capacity and the will and the ability to do it.”
But the report claims that officials within the government privately criticized the airlift as a “strategic failure” and an “ugly final phase” of the war.
The report also claimed that Biden acted against the advice of top-level military figures, who favored continued deployment in Afghanistan.
