EXCLUSIVE — Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper rebuked the Biden administration‘s after-action report on the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
President Joe Biden’s team released a 12-page unclassified summary last week of the after-action report about the withdrawal, and it pinned much of the blame for how the withdrawal occurred on the Trump administration. Specifically, the summary cited then-President Donald Trump’s decision to reduce the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and to agree to a withdrawal in a February 2020 deal with the Taliban as significant factors that forced Biden’s hand.
AFGHANISTANÂ EVACUATIONS SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED EARLIER, WHITE HOUSE ADMITS
“I think it was really bad that they’re trying to rewrite the history the way they did, to blame it on the Trump administration, when they had enough time … to make any number of decisions,” he told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday. “To review the agreement, to cast aside the agreement, to renegotiate the agreement, or to hope to move forward on it, which is what they did in the day. I think to kind of blame it on the Trump administration is just terrible.”
While the Trump administration agreed to leave in the deal with the Taliban, which came during Esper’s time as secretary of defense, the Biden administration opted to move forward with that plan, as the president campaigned on and advocated ending the forever wars.
“Then to point fingers at the military leadership and point fingers at the intelligence community. It seems like everybody got blame out of this except for the White House,” Esper added. “So I thought it was a poor showing, and we all recognize it was an abysmal evacuation from Afghanistan that hurt us, internationally, reputationally, really, and we need a better after-action review, a better list of recommendations about what we saw, and I hope Congress will get into the matter and peel back that onion.”
Esper’s call for Congress to investigate the war echoes that of former U.S. Central Command Commander Gen. Frank McKenzie, who told the Washington Examiner last month that he supports such oversight.
With the U.S. military set to depart at the end of August 2021 and the Taliban rapidly gaining territory throughout the country at the beginning of the month, the U.S. military began what became the largest airborne evacuation of noncombatants in history. They evacuated roughly 120,000 Afghans in those final two weeks of August, with flights taking off hourly, though thousands of other U.S. allies in Afghanistan were left behind. The environment at and all around the Kabul airport, where the evacuations were taking place, was swarmed daily by thousands of Afghans frantically hoping to leave the country.
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The White House denied the withdrawal was chaotic during the press conference following the summary’s release.
“For all this talk of chaos, I didn’t see it from my perch,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters last Thursday. “I just don’t buy the whole argument of chaos.”
