Senate Republicans on Thursday released a report detailing the administration of US President Joe Biden's chaotic and last-minute efforts to fly American citizens out of Afghanistan last August as Kabul fell to the Taliban following the US military withdrawal.
James Risch, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement that he compiled the report to describe “how the Biden administration’s failure of duty allowed for a quick Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and botched withdrawal that left hundreds of Americans and tens of thousands of Afghan partners behind".
Notably, the report says Mr Biden's administration did not convene a senior-level inter-agency meeting or make a final decision on removing Americans from Afghanistan until August 14 — mere hours before the Taliban took over Kabul.
“The summary of conclusions from the [Washington] DC meeting on August 14 included actions which should have been taken months in advance, including but not limited to: reaching out to third countries to serve as transit points, alerting locally employed US embassy staff about relocation and standing up a communication/manifest team for flights out of Kabul,” the report says.
It also says that “in the absence of guidance” from leaders in the State Department, “embassies in the region took initiative and established their own ad hoc task forces to work the Afghanistan evacuation".
In addition, the report notes that the State Department did not send Ambassador John Bass, who oversaw the evacuation effort, until August 17 as crowds of Afghan civilians flooded Hamad Karzai International Airport attempting to escape the violence.
Thousands of desperate Afghans attempt to board flights out of Kabul
A representative for the National Security Council rebutted the report’s findings as “cherry-picked notes from one meeting” and noted that the Biden administration had flown out about 2,000 of the approximately 17,000 Afghans who assisted the US military and their families in the months before the fall of Kabul.
“It was because of this type of planning and other efforts that we were able to facilitate the evacuation of more than 120,000 Americans, legal permanent residents, vulnerable Afghans and other partners,” the representative told The National.
Still, Mr Risch’s report details how “many of the gaps caused by the Biden administration’s poor planning actually had to be filled by congressional staff, independent veterans groups, non-governmental organisations and other private entities who co-ordinated pickups, documents and other means of continued evacuations and advocacy for US partners left behind".
At certain points during the evacuation, the deteriorating security situation around Kabul's airport prompted US authorities to refuse entry to Afghan visa-holders to board flights out of the country unless they had a direct contact with someone already inside the facility.
The report also outlines continued deficiencies in the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) programme for Afghans who helped the US military which spanned multiple administrations, noting the failure of the State and Defence departments to co-ordinate as well as insufficient staffing.
“These challenges predate this administration, but it is remarkable that the Biden administration took minimal action from the time of President Biden’s withdrawal announcement to address these deficiencies,” the report states.
A White House representative said the Biden administration took action to resuscitate the SIV programme after it stagnated under former president Donald Trump’s restrictive immigration policy.
“When president Trump freed thousands of Taliban fighters, undermined the Afghan government, withdrew troops with no plan on what to do next and dismantled our nation’s refugee programmes, Republicans on the committee did next to nothing,” a White House representative told The National.
“When we took office, we got to work rebuilding a refugee resettlement programme that had been systematically dismantled, revitalising [an SIV] programme that had not even interviewed people in 300 days and began contingency planning for any number of scenarios.”
Still, the US left most SIV holders in Afghanistan, putting them at risk of Taliban retaliation. It is unclear exactly how many US citizens remain in Afghanistan.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin updated Congress on the number of remaining US citizens in the country during a Senate briefing on Wednesday, though that figure is not publicly available as it took place in a classified setting.
James Inhofe, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, called “their overall testimony lacking".
“For a classified briefing, I would have liked to hear more details regarding the inter-agency planning process, nature of the terrorist threat in Afghanistan today and their counter-terrorism plans going forward,” Mr Inhofe said in a statement after the briefing.
However, he noted that he had secured commitments from both Mr Blinken and Mr Austin to give evidence on Afghanistan again in a public setting.
