New report shows the disastrous consequences of Biden’s Afghanistan bug-out
Quin Hillyer
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A scathing new Inspector General report details the Biden administration’s deadly ineptitude during the 2021 United States withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The administration’s own separate, recent report on Afghanistan attempted to whitewash the administration’s obvious failures while placing most of the blame for the fiasco on former President Donald Trump. Almost everything Biden’s report said about Trump’s culpability was correct, but it was still an insufficient account because it denied and downplayed Biden’s primary responsibility.
In contrast, today’s new IG report, issued independently of White House control, provides the lacking context as to how badly Biden screwed up.
John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, is assigned to track all U.S. grants, programs, and operations intended for humanitarian and civil-society aid for that beleaguered central-Asian country. Sopko’s cover letter minces no words: “Afghanistan is facing a humanitarian catastrophe brought on by the Taliban takeover of the country following the U.S. withdrawal.”
The body of the report is even more damning: “Given the collapse of the Afghan government, the takeover by the Taliban, the withdrawal of U.S. forces, and the closure of the U.S. Embassy-Kabul, the U.S. government’s ability to effectively oversee its assistance to Afghanistan has been severely hampered and there remains heightened risk that U.S. assistance and funds have benefited bad actors and been subjected to waste, fraud, and abuse.”
The financial scope of the problem is large, involving more than $2 billion from U.S. taxpayers and another $3.5 billion of previously frozen Afghan central bank reserves. Indications now are that a significant portion of that aid is not only failing to reach the intended recipients but instead is being used by the Taliban to further abuse those intended recipients, making them victims instead.
The biggest moral blight on the Biden administration, though, is the failure, born of incompetence, to redeem Biden’s personal vow that Afghans who had helped U.S. efforts there would not be left behind. Instead, Sopko reports, “about 175,000 Afghans are waiting for the U.S. government to process” their visas or refugee applications. And that doesn’t count their “derivative family members,” which means that, as of last August, “more than 500,000 Afghans were waiting for [visa] processing.”
Congress in 2014 set a requirement that the U.S. government-controlled parts of the special visa process take no more than nine months. Instead, the government-controlled steps are taking an average of 20 months, and the whole process takes an average of 2.75 years. One reputable estimate, Sopko reports, is that at the current rate, it will take 31 years to relocate all bona fide Afghan applicants.
Meanwhile, speaking of those Afghans who helped the Western allies briefly establish a civil society in Afghanistan, the report says that “twenty months after the [U.S.] withdrawal, many are in hiding in Afghanistan, trying to escape Taliban retaliation. Others have already been arrested or killed.”
This atrocity also could have international repercussions, Sopko matter-of-factly reports. “Leaving Afghan partners behind risks causing allies around the world to question U.S. credibility,” he notes.
The dreadful bill of particulars also includes a massive humanitarian crisis of hunger, lack of medical care, and horrid human-rights abuses in Afghanistan. Worse, the Taliban have allowed terrorist groups to expand in-country bases of operations in ways that “could pose a threat to the U.S. and its allies,” almost as if history were repeating itself.
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It is an undeniable reality that neither Biden nor Trump came close to adequately planning for how the U.S. would withdraw from Afghanistan, even as they publicly set specific, precipitous exit dates. And Biden’s actual execution of the bug-out and its aftermath provides an example of tragic bungling that history may never forget.
Today’s Inspector General report shows the catastrophic repercussions of that incompetence continue to reverberate.