The White House has released a review of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan that blames former President Donald Trump and the intelligence services for the failure.
The report, however, defended the overall American conduct of the operation.
According to the French news agency AFP, the review report has been sent to Congress, where the Republican majority in the House of Representatives is investigating whether President Joe Biden has failed during the August 2021 recall.
In presenting the summary, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby acknowledged that mistakes had been made in the withdrawal. “Ending any war is not an easy task, certainly not even after 20 years,” he told reporters. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth doing, ending the war in Afghanistan.
The White House has largely blamed former President Donald Trump for creating the conditions that led to the defeat.
However, he also acknowledged that US intelligence services failed to understand the strength of the Taliban and the weakness of Afghan government forces.
“We obviously didn’t do things right,” John Kirby said.
The summary of the report states that “President Joe Biden refuses to send another generation of Americans to fight a war that should have ended long ago for America.”
In the summary, the White House said in reference to the February 2020 agreement between the Trump administration and the Taliban that it (the agreement) put the incoming Biden administration in an impossible position.
“The outgoing Trump administration gave the Biden administration a withdrawal date but no plan to implement it and four years of neglect, critical systems, offices and agency functions necessary for a safe and orderly withdrawal. has not been fixed.’
The report also stated that Trump had steadily reduced the US troop presence in Afghanistan during his last 11 months in office. By the time Joe Biden takes office in January 2021, only 2,500 personnel are in Afghanistan. As a result, the Taliban were in the strongest military position.
In a post on his Truth social app on Thursday, Trump called the current White House “foolish” and said they were responsible for the surrender in Afghanistan.
He wrote that ‘Biden is responsible, no one else!’
