Mistakes were made

In that respect, the chaotic scenes from Hamid Karzai International Airport were a microcosm for everything that went wrong with the U.S. mission in Afghanistan over the past two decades.

Let’s begin with the obvious.

Failure to revamp the special immigrant visa process: From the day the Trump administration signed a separate deal with the Taliban to facilitate its final troop withdrawal, the United States knew it would need to expedite the cumbersome 14-step special immigrant visa process to save the lives of Afghans who worked shoulder to shoulder with Americans. A December State Department and Homeland Security Department report put the average time to complete the 14-step application process at 996 days, more than 2 1/2 years. Staff shortages exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic were partly to blame, along with requirements for documents that were hard to obtain. By the time Congress allocated more slots and appropriated more funds last month, there was already a backlog of more than 17,000 pending applications, with thousands more seeking to apply. Many of those trapped in Afghanistan would be here now if the process had been fixed. “The State Department has to stop giving people death sentences over typos and paperwork and the wrong forms filled out,” said Rep. Mike Waltz, a Florida Republican and a former Green Beret who served in Afghanistan. “The State Department could drastically streamline the bureaucracy as they did for the South Vietnamese so many years ago.”

Failure to put civilians first: When President Joe Biden set a deadline of Sept. 11 for all remaining U.S. troops to leave Afghanistan, the U.S. military moved quickly, intending to beat the deadline, and by July, they were mostly gone. Based on overly optimistic initial intelligence assessments that the Kabul government would be able to hold out for a year or more, the Pentagon saw no role for the military in the evacuation of Afghan civilians, who it thought would be gradually processed by the embassy and flown out on commercial or charter planes. “They should have gotten everybody out before we moved our military out,” said former President Donald Trump on Fox, even though Trump originally tried to bring all U.S. troops home by Christmas, with no plan for evacuating America’s Afghan allies. Even now, Biden won’t commit to extending his Aug. 31 deadline for the weeks or possibly months it would take to evacuate the 50,000 to 65,000 Afghans who are hiding out in fear of the Taliban.

Failure to hold on to Bagram Air Base: One of the biggest blunders was abandoning the strategic Bagram Air Base north of Kabul two months before the U.S. military needed to. The base would have provided a platform to launch more effective airstrikes to blunt the Taliban advance and an air bridge to evacuate Americans and Afghans before panic set in. The sprawling facility, the size of a small city, could have safely accommodated thousands of evacuees with its massive hangar-size tents, food facilities, and a 50-bed hospital. It also has two runways, which would have facilitated airlift. When the Americans departed in July, they left behind vast stockpiles of supplies, including tens of thousands of bottles of water, energy drinks, and military meals known as MREs, as well as hundreds of armored vehicles and small weapons and ammunition.

Failure to foresee the collapse of the Afghanistan army: At a Pentagon briefing, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, a former U.S. Afghanistan commander, stated flatly, “There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.” But in retrospect, it should have been no surprise. All you had to do is read the quarterly reports to Congress by the Pentagon’s own special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, who detailed massive corruption, “ghost soldiers,” and an army spread so thin it could not survive without being resupplied by U.S. airlift. The Afghan army didn’t lose its will. It lost its lifeline. Afghan soldiers surrendered or cut deals with the Taliban because they ran out of food and ammunition and faced certain death. The 300,000 Afghan troop strength repeatedly cited by the president was highly inflated, said Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Of that 300,000, some 60% were police, which really couldn’t fight at all. You had about a 25% turnover in the army, which means a large part was inexperienced and untrained.”

Failure to grasp how Trump’s Taliban deal kneecapped the Afghan government: The beginning of the collapse of the Afghan military can be traced to the Feb. 20 deal Trump made with the Taliban while cutting the Afghan government out of the process. Though touted as a peace deal, the Taliban considered it tantamount to articles of surrender and lived up to only one of its provisions: not to attack the U.S. forces while they packed up to leave. “The capitulation agreement emboldened the Taliban,” said Trump’s former national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster. “We weakened the Afghan government and security forces on our way out by not insisting on a ceasefire, by forcing them to release 5,000 of some of the most heinous people on Earth.” The freed Taliban prisoners joined the fight, just one of a series of psychological blows the U.S. delivered to the Afghan government and the Afghan people. “Secretary [of State Antony] Blinken wrote a letter to Ashraf Ghani to ask him to do more for peace, as the Taliban were assassinating Afghans and committing mass murder attacks across the country,” said McMaster.

A failure of imagination: Biden argues he had only two options when he inherited the withdrawal plan from Trump: pull all the troops out or send more in and stay indefinitely. But Mark Esper, Trump’s penultimate defense secretary, said there were other, better options. Esper wanted to make the withdrawal of the last 4,500 troops “conditions-based,” contingent on the Taliban’s compliance with other provisions of the withdrawal deal, including promises to reduce violence, break with al Qaeda, and negotiate in good faith with the Afghan government. Esper was overruled and was subsequently fired by Trump, who wanted to bring all the troops home before he left office, but Esper said Biden was not bound to the Trump plan. “He could have taken a completely different path. He could have tried to go back to the table with the Taliban and renegotiate,” Esper told CNN in an interview. “He could have demanded, as I argued, that they agree to the conditions they established or they agreed to in the agreement and that we use military power to compel them to do that.”

Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.