Tens of thousands of Afghans who worked for the U.S. government were left stranded in Afghanistan because the Biden administration failed to properly plan for a large-scale evacuation, according to a forthcoming report from Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“From August 15 to August 31, the United States completed its largest air evacuation. However, this evacuation was marred by a lack of planning, coordination, and communication,” according to excerpts of the report obtained by NBC News.
“The administration failed to establish a clear system of how to contact evacuees and processes to allow them into the airport. The result left American citizens, U.S. legal permanent residents, and Afghan allies abandoned to the fate of the Taliban regime,“ the GOP senators said.
Jan. 29, 202202:28
The forthcoming report, due to be released Thursday, is the first by Congress into the evacuation effort since last year’s chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. House Republicans are drafting a separate report.
After President Joe Biden announced his decision in April to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, the administration failed to make plans to evacuate Americans and Afghan partners until the U.S. military had removed the bulk of its forces and closed its major air base north of Kabul, the Senate GOP report said.
The ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. James Risch of Idaho, wrote in an introduction to the report that the Biden administration’s “failure of duty” allowed for “a botched withdrawal that left hundreds of Americans and tens of thousands of Afghan partners behind.”
He added: “The United States will have to deal with the fallout of this failure for years to come.”
The administration’s failures came despite numerous indications and public reports that Afghan security forces were struggling to hold back the Taliban and that Afghans who had worked with U.S. troops and diplomats faced a growing danger, the report said.
It was not until Aug. 14, with Kabul on the verge of a Taliban takeover, that the White House gave the greenlight to launch evacuations, according to excerpts from the report.
“The administration did not make a decision on evacuations from Afghanistan until a National Security Council Deputies Committee meeting on August 14, mere hours before the fall of Kabul,“ it said.
Axios first reported the National Security Council deputies’ session.
The summary of conclusions from that meeting, according to the Senate report, “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 U.S. embassy staff about relocation, and standing up a communication/ manifest team for flights out of Kabul.”
“It is inexcusable that the [deputies committee] met at such a late date,” it said.
The NSC deputies committee was the most senior level group in the U.S. government that could assess warning signs from Kabul and assign tasks across government agencies to relocate Americans and Afghans, it said.
“There is no record provided that the [deputies committee] met any time before August 14 to begin discussions on safe and orderly relocations out of Afghanistan,” it said.
White House NSC spokesperson Emily Horne told Axios that the “cherry-picked notes from one meeting do not reflect the months of work that were already underway.”
The Biden administration has pushed back on previous criticism from lawmakers and refugee advocacy groups about how it handled the U.S. withdrawal, saying the intelligence community and the military did not predict that the Afghan government would collapse as rapidly as it did.
A spokesperson for the NSC told NBC News the previous administration had made “no plans for ensuring the safe evacuation of our Afghan allies” and passed on a visa program for Afghan partners that was plagued with a massive backlog and a cumbersome application process. The Trump administration also had “purposefully gutted” the U.S. refugee resettlement program, the spokesperson said.
The Biden administration ramped up resources and drastically reduced the processing time for the special immigrant visa program, the spokesperson added.
The administration also moved U.S. troops into the region to be ready for a potential evacuation. “As we prepared to leave Afghanistan, we pre-positioned military assets in the region that enabled us to execute one of the largest airlifts in history, facilitating the relocation of more than 120,000 individuals,” the spokesperson said.
The State Department has said that all Americans in Afghanistan who wanted to leave have departed and those that remain have chosen to stay because of family members or relatives who do not have U.S. passports or visas.
According to excerpts from the report, the Republican senators acknowledged that the Biden administration inherited a deeply flawed visa program designed to help Afghan interpreters and others who worked for the U.S. government relocate to the United States. The special immigrant visa program was plagued by backlogs over several administrations, they said.
But the Republicans said the State Department should have taken into account the program’s deficiencies and made plans to evacuate large numbers of Afghan applicants.
“With the Taliban hunting down those who had assisted the United States, State should have planned to relocate a sizable amount of these people,” the report said.
According to an excerpt, the Biden administration did not contact regional governments about the possibility of hosting evacuation flights until the middle of July.
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Armed Services Committee held a closed-door hearing Wednesday on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
