House Republicans issue scathing report criticizing Biden’s Afghanistan

The House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans’ report, which is being published around one year after the country’s capital fell to the Taliban, reveals additional new details about the Biden administration’s failure to adequately plan for and execute the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The report, a final draft of which was obtained by CNN, also says the administration did not accurately portray the nature of the events on the ground and failed to put a plan in place to prevent American-trained Afghan commandos from being recruited by America’s adversaries.

In the weeks and months that followed, bipartisan lawmakers urged the administration to ensure plans were in place to ensure the protection of Afghans who worked for the US during the nearly two-decade long conflict, including evacuation options.

Both the State Department and the Pentagon have conducted their own reviews of the withdrawal, but neither of the departments have released any findings. The Pentagon’s review is ongoing while the State Department concluded theirs in March, according to a source familiar with the review. The delay of its release is due, in part, to an interagency review process layered with concerns about politics, optics and effective implementation of lessons learned.

The House report found that it was not until mid-June 2021 that the US Embassy in Kabul held an Operational Planning Team (OPT) meeting with members of the US military and US diplomats focused on pre-planning for non-combatant evacuation operations (NEO). The meeting was described by one US military officer involved as “the first time” that the embassy began “looking at the possibility of NEO.”

Because of the “complete lack of proper planning by the Biden administration” there were consequences: evacuation flights “were taking off at only about 50% of their capacity” five days into the NEO, the report says. The report references slow processing at the gates and mayhem outside the gates — a government evacuation process so chaotic and disorderly that even staffers for Vice President Kamala Harris and first lady Jill Biden were contacting outside groups to try to get people out, representatives for the groups told the committee.

Evacuation flights overwhelmingly carried men

The report found that those who were able to get out on those evacuation flights were overwhelmingly male, despite concerns — which have now been borne out — about women being stripped of freedoms when the Taliban took over.

“We now know through data from the Departments of State and Homeland Security that only approximately 25 percent of those evacuated during the NEO in Afghanistan were women or girls. To put this figure in context, historically, women and girls represent more than half of emergency refugee outflows,” Ambassador Kelley Currie, the ambassador-at-large for the State Department’s Office of Global Women’s Issues under the Trump administration, wrote in the report.

As Kabul fell and then-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, two top American officials — Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, the then-head of US Central Command, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the then-special representative for Afghanistan who brokered the US-Taliban deal under Trump — met with Taliban officials in Doha, where the militant group offered the US control of security of the capital city.

McKenzie testified he turned the offer down, telling Congress in September 2021, “That was not why I was there, that was not my instruction, and we did not have the resources to undertake that mission.”

However, Khalilzad told the committee that he thought “we could have considered it,” the report said. The former official also said the US did not order the Taliban to stay out of Kabul.

“We didn’t say, ‘don’t go.’ We advised them to be careful,” Khalilzad said, according to the report. Meanwhile, US officials had been repeatedly saying that the US supported…