Ryan Crocker decries ‘White House whitewash’ of chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal after new report deflects blame

WASHINGTON – After President Joe Biden’s administration on Thursday released a report that largely denies responsibility for the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, a former U.S. ambassador to the Central Asian nation called the document “shameful” and “a White House whitewash.”

The report, which the White House gave to reporters just minutes before Thursday’s press briefing ahead of the holiday weekend, concedes that the U.S. government should have begun evacuating Americans and their Afghan allies earlier. But the remainder of the 12-page document pins blame on the Trump administration – which negotiated a U.S. withdrawal with the Taliban militants who now rule the country – and on Afghanistan’s deposed government.

Retired Ambassador Ryan Crocker, a Spokane Valley native who capped a four-decade career in the foreign service as the top U.S. diplomat in Kabul in 2011 and 2012, said in an interview Friday that the Biden administration is “trying to have it both ways,” blaming former President Donald Trump despite essentially continuing his policies on Afghanistan.

“A huge responsibility rests with Trump and his senior officials, no question about it,” Crocker said. “But that does not somehow absolve the Biden administration for carrying out the Donald Trump policy.”

Crocker said Biden’s decision to keep Trump’s Afghanistan envoy who negotiated the deal with the Taliban, Zalmay Khalilzad, was a clear sign of staying on the path set by the previous administration.

The report says Biden’s options in Afghanistan were “severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor.” It concludes, “the speed and ease with which the Taliban took control of Afghanistan suggests that there was no scenario – except a permanent and significantly expanded U.S. military presence – that would have changed the trajectory.”

“Frankly, it’s dishonest,” Crocker said of that claim. “This administration – ably and amply assisted by the previous administration, of course – were the ones who set the stage for that incredibly swift Taliban takeover.”

Crocker argued that Biden should have increased the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, whose primary mission by 2021 was training Afghan forces and protecting American assets, while sending a clear message that a U.S. withdrawal would depend on the Taliban reaching a peace deal with the government in Kabul.

Instead, he said, Biden administration officials sent mixed messages in the weeks after they took office on Jan. 20, 2021. Two days after Biden’s inauguration, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called his Afghan counterpart and, according to a White House summary of the call, “committed to consulting closely with the Government of Afghanistan, NATO allies, and regional partners regarding a collective strategy to support a stable, sovereign, and secure future for Afghanistan.”

Less than two months later, Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent a letter to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, warning that the U.S. was considering a full troop withdrawal by May 1. Crocker called that turnabout “an insult” that reflected the same disrespect the Trump administration had shown Afghanistan’s leaders.

In Thursday’s briefing at the White House, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby defended the report, whose purpose he said is “not accountability,” but rather applying the lessons of Afghanistan to future crises.

“Clearly, we didn’t get things right,” Kirby said to reporters. “We didn’t anticipate how fast the Afghan National Security Forces were going to fold, were not going to fight for their country – particularly after we had, as I said, dedicated 20 years, trained and equipped them.”

Crocker, who also served as the top U.S. diplomat in Afghanistan immediately after the U.S. invasion in 2001, said the country’s military was weakened and demoralized after the United States withdrew key support for its air force and forced the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners as part of the U.S.-Taliban exit deal, which the Afghan government was excluded from.

“The notion that they would not fight for their country is contemptible,” Crocker said. “To me, it’s extraordinary that the Afghan military stayed in the fight for as long as they did.”

Despite the timing of the report’s release, with Congress out of session, GOP lawmakers were quick to criticize its claims. Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the report’s release “sad and untimely.”

“In Afghanistan, the withdrawal allowed the Taliban to quickly take over, and the country has once again become a haven for terrorists,” Risch said in a statement. “The rights of women and girls have vanished, and too many Americans and our Afghan partners remain trapped there.”

While the report touts the Biden administration’s work to ramp up the processing of special immigrant visas for Afghans who aided Americans as interpreters and in other roles that could make them targets of the Taliban, Crocker said the report’s failure to mention the Afghan allies still trying to flee the country is “as shameful and as egregious to me as anything that is in the document.”

The Biden administration estimates there are more than 150,000 special immigrant visa applicants still trying to escape Afghanistan, Foreign Policy reported in March. That number could be twice as high, advocates told The New Republic that same month.

The chaotic pull-out from Afghanistan has proved to be a political liability for Biden, punctuated by a suicide bombing during the evacuation that killed 13 U.S. service members and injured 45 others, while killing 170 Afghans. Crocker said he sees Thursday’s report as an effort to “take Afghanistan off the table as an element in the political debate.”

“That was the whole motivation behind Biden’s disastrous decision to pull us all the way out,” he said. “To get Afghanistan off the table so that he didn’t have to deal with it anymore.”

But Crocker said the White House report is correct that the Trump administration is responsible for the collapse of Afghanistan’s government.

“They bear a huge responsibility,” he said. “That’s one of the frustrating things with statements coming out on the Republican side. It’s like there was no Trump administration vis-a-vis Afghanistan. They set the stage for what would eventually happen.”