White House reignites GOP criticism with Afghanistan review

The White House reignited criticism over its handling of the August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan on Thursday when it released a 12-page review of the decision-making process that largely blamed the Trump administration for limiting President Biden’s options upon taking office.

Republicans took issue with the White House’s characterization, and with comments from national security spokesperson John Kirby, previewing the aggressive oversight the Biden administration will face in the coming weeks over one of the low points of the president’s first two years in office.

While the Biden administration evacuated some 100,000 allies and American citizens from the country, the abrupt fall of Kabul accelerated the chaos of the U.S. withdrawal.

Thousands crowded around the Hamid Karzai International Airport, complicating the evacuation while a suicide bomber killed 13 U.S. service members along with 170 Afghans.

The so-called After Action Review acknowledges those difficulties, but the documents itself, as well as Kirby’s comments, set a contentious tone as numerous committees plan to review the fallout under GOP leadership.

It also sparked criticism from advocates who pushed the administration to prepare for the withdrawal negotiated under the Trump administration in order to successfully evacuate those that aided the two-year U.S. campaign in the country.

“It was very frustrating to see that this is coming now because, as you and I know, they have done this review because of the congressional oversight,”said Mustafa Babak, executive director of the Afghan-American Foundation. 

“The way that we perceived the tone, was ‘Yeah, look, we acknowledge this. This was a failure, but also this was the fault of the previous administration.’ Which is yes and no, because I think the Biden administration had all the tools to make sure that they actually were a little bit more prepared than they were back in August,” he added.

The document released by the White House Thursday offered an unclassified outline of the White House’s findings on the withdrawal effort. The administration separately turned over classified reviews from the Pentagon and State Department to relevant congressional committees.

In the review and subsequent comments by Kirby, the White House’s view was that the Trump administration had created unfavorable conditions and restricted Biden’s options for getting U.S. forces out of Afghanistan.

“He didn’t negotiate with the Taliban,” Kirby said of Biden. “He didn’t invite the Taliban to Camp David. He didn’t release 5,000 prisoners. He didn’t reduce force levels in Afghanistan to 2,500, and he didn’t have an arrangement with the Taliban that they wouldn’t attack our troops. He came in with a certain set of circumstances he had no ability to change, he had to deal with it based on what he inherited.”

Kirby also repeatedly rebuffed reporters who described the withdrawal process as chaotic.

“For all this talk of chaos, I just didn’t see it. Not from my perch,” said Kirby, who was Pentagon press secretary at the time of the withdrawal.

The August 2021 withdrawal drew intense criticism at the time. Images circulated of crowds swarming the airport to try and get out of the country. Video in one instance showed evacuation planes taking off as citizens clung to the wheels.

The White House document released Thursday did not explicitly state that the administration made mistakes in the withdrawal, but it did lay out that the evacuation of forces and allies should have started sooner once the security situation was deteriorating.  

The document said that the White House took what it learned from Afghanistan and has since applied it to personnel evacuation efforts in Ethiopia and Ukraine.

The Afghanistan withdrawal is expected to become a focal point for Republicans hoping to highlight the Biden administration’s handling of the situation as the GOP ramps up its oversight powers with its relatively new House majority.

“I look forward to reviewing the report and call upon the administration to declassify as much as possible for the American public. Finally, Congress must be given access to the full and complete record of documents from the withdrawal in order to get the answers on why the withdrawal was such a disaster,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said in a statement. He called Kirby’s comments “disgraceful and insulting.”

McCaul, who is leading the GOP probe of the withdrawal, has thus far held one hearing on the topic, bringing in a slate of veterans to testify about the efforts to aid their Afghan partners in escaping the country. But he hopes to have numerous additional hearings on the topic.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said he will host a hearing on April 19 with Pentagon and State Department officials “to examine their work on the factors that led to the collapse of Afghanistan.”

Brett Bruen, a former diplomat who worked in the Obama White House, said he is concerned that the Biden administration’s approach to the review shows they are not seriously addressing mistakes that may crop up again in the future.

“They stubbornly refuse to acknowledge what went wrong, to accept responsibility and most importantly to address the areas that still require fixing,” Bruen said.

It’s an area likely to be fixated on during the Republican hearings, and one Democrats have struggled to address.

“Democrats need to stop pretending like this wasn’t a disaster, and just start owning it,” said Chris Purdy, director of Veterans for American Ideals, which has pushed to expedite pathways to the U.S. for those that worked alongside the military both before and after the evacuation.

But he said Republicans are minimizing the extent to which Trump’s actions set the stage for the complications of the withdrawal.

“You know, John Kirby was right in his briefing yesterday,” Purdy said, pointing to a series of missteps in negotiations with the Taliban.

“These are all Trump things. What I’m saying here is both administrations, both parties own pretty much equal share of this. And they just need to stop pretending like they don’t because it’s just not helpful. And it’s annoying,” he said.

For all the criticism about the lack of accountability from the White House, Kirby suggested that was not the purpose of the after-action review and the information released Thursday by the White House.

“This document and this effort isn’t about accountability today,” Kirby said. “It’s about understanding.”

But the back-and-forth ahead of the probes highlights another sticking point for those who have been advocating for both a pathway to citizenship for Afghans brough to the U.S. in the evacuation and pathways to safety for those unable to free.

“From my perspective, we still have a lot of work left to do to actually clean up the mess of the evac,” Purdy said. “And I’m waiting for that.”