‘Willfully Blind’: Biden Admin Ignored Repeated Military Warnings ahead of Disastrous Afghanistan Withdrawal

President Biden’s insistence on withdrawing entirely from Afghanistan no matter the cost — despite repeated warnings from the military and NATO allies — exposed American personnel to security threats and allowed the Taliban to quickly remake the country into a terrorist safe-haven, according to a new congressional report.

Taking their cue from Biden himself, senior State Department officials were hellbent on getting every last U.S. troop out of Afghanistan by September 11, 2021, regardless of the security situation on the ground or the Taliban’s compliance with the previously negotiated Doha Agreement, according to a 354 page report compiled by the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Republican majority.

The Biden administration disregarded warnings that the Taliban was not holding up its end of the agreement, which was negotiated by the Trump administration several years earlier, and ignored advice from multiple top military officials and NATO allies to reconsider the Afghanistan departure.

“Mr. Biden has demonstrated distrust of America’s military experts and advisors and has prioritized politics and his personal legacy over America’s national security interests,” the report observes.

The Foreign Affairs Committee GOP’s report is the culmination of an investigation that included public hearings, closed-door transcribed interviews, and analysis of more than 20,000 pages of State Department documents, despite obstruction and obfuscation from the Biden administration at every turn.

The report pins a significant portion of the blame for the botched withdrawal on the State Department’s decision to disregard senior military officials who repeatedly warned that the timeline for withdrawal was too short and that, if troops were to be drawn down rapidly, diplomatic personnel should be withdrawn at a similar pace for security reasons. Both of those arguments fell on deaf ears, according to the report.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the diplomat responsible for the Doha agreement, is accused of excluding the Afghan government from the negotiations and dismissing concerns that the Taliban were bad-faith negotiating partners. The report accuses Khalilzad of keeping military leaders in the dark during the negotiations and undermining the legitimacy of the Afghan government, accusations he countered on social media ahead of the report’s release.

“No agreement was made on any military issue without the full knowledge of our military leaders and their participation in decisions made by our leaders,” he said on X.

Against the military’s advice, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Ross Wilson and secretary of state Antony Blinken pushed to keep the U.S. embassy in Kabul open, a decision general Kenneth McKenzie called the “fatal flaw” behind the Afghanistan mess. State Department officials even watered down and re-wrote warnings from diplomatic security and the Pentagon about the plan to maintain a large embassy presence to conceal how precarious the situation had become.

“This report proves senior Biden-Harris administration officials were willfully blind to warnings about the degrading security situation on the ground given to them by U.S. military personnel, U.S. intelligence assessments, American and international media reports, and State Department personnel in Kabul who sent a Dissent Channel cable in July 2021. Instead, they consistently prioritized the optics of maintaining a large U.S. embassy presence over the safety of embassy personnel,” the report reads.

Wilson also took little interest in contingency planning for a noncombatant evacuation operation (NEO), a move the State Department viewed as a political failure and only resorted to once the Taliban began marching into Kabul, the nation’s capital. In the eyes of General Mark Milley, the “fundamental mistake” of the withdrawal was the fact that Wilson did not call for an emergency evacuation until August 15, and when he finally did, the U.S. had not fully planned it out. Wilson’s adamant opposition to the noncombatant evacuation operation prompted staffers to hold secret meetings to discuss contingencies privately.

“The investigation has revealed senior State Department and NSC officials equated a NEO with failure. This explains, in part, the decision to keep Embassy Kabul open no matter the cost and their refusal to plan for a [noncombatant evacuation operation],” the report says. There was no pre-planned evacuation for a scenario where the Taliban would take control of the country.

Another major mistake was the decision to withdraw contractors alongside U.S. troops, a move that significantly degraded Afghan military operations and made it easier for the Taliban to rapidly gain territory with no pushback from local forces.

During the withdrawal, classified documents and systems were left behind as pandemonium and chaos ensued. An embassy employee later concluded that the Taliban was using the classified information that was abandoned.

At the Hamid Karzai International Airport, the unplanned NEO and rapid military troop reduction contributed to the airport being shut down for 48 hours, until a U.S. force reclaimed the area. The State Department continued to struggle to evacuate civilians, both Americans and Afghan allies, leaving only a handful of consular officers on the ground to make decisions based on mixed-messaging coming from national security personnel.

Of all the events surrounding the Afghanistan withdrawal, none was more costly than the suicide bombing at the airport that killed 185 people including 13 U.S. marines, and wounded 45 U.S. service members.

The military chose to keep the gate open despite a security assessment finding that it was at the highest risk of attack, according to the report. The Biden administration also lacked the political will to conduct operations targeting members of ISIS-K, the terror group that carried out the bombing, and instead relied on the Taliban for security or, in the words of the report, “relied on terrorists to capture other terrorists.”

These days, the Taliban’s terrorist regime is overseeing rampant human-rights violations across Afghanistan and denying women basic freedoms such as the ability to gain a basic education or travel by themselves. The Taliban continues to hold American hostages and carry out revenge-killings against former Afghan government officials. Besides the Taliban, terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda have an active presence in the country to expand operations and plan potential terrorist attacks.

“Our investigation reveals the Biden-Harris administration had the information and opportunity to take necessary steps to plan for the inevitable collapse of the Afghan government, so we could safely evacuate U.S. personnel, American citizens, green card holders, and our brave Afghan allies. At each step of the way, however, the administration picked optics over security,” McCaul said in a statement.

“As a direct result of the failure to plan for all contingencies, 13 U.S. servicemembers and 170 Afghans were murdered in a terrorist attack at Abbey Gate on August 26, 2021, and 45 U.S. servicemembers and countless Afghans were injured. This was preventable.”

Representative Gregory Meeks (D., N.Y), the committee’s ranking member, wrote a rebuttal memo accusing House Republicans of politicizing the Afghanistan withdrawal and taking pains to avoid placing blame on Trump. The Biden administration continues to defend the decision to end the war in Afghanistan after 20 years.

Former Foreign Affairs Committee senior investigator Jerry Dunleavy, a conservative journalist and author of a book about the Afghanistan withdrawal, publicly resigned from his post before the report came out and accused committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R., Texas) of deliberately keeping military personnel and Vice President Kamala Harris out of the crossfire.

The botched Afghanistan withdrawal was a pivotal moment in President Biden’s term – ending his honeymoon and sending his approval rating into a downward spiral from which he never fully recovered. 

Biden was personally committed to leaving Afghanistan and felt more passionately about the issue than most others he confronted during his presidency, according to special counsel Robert Hur, who discussed the Afghanistan issue with Biden while interviewing him as part of his classified-documents probe.

Biden was particularly hung up on his opposition to the troop surge executed while he was serving as President Obama’s vice president in 2009.

Hur discovered that Biden kept “materials documenting his opposition to the troop surge, including a classified handwritten memo he sent President Obama over the 2009 Thanksgiving holiday, and related marked classified documents,” a view that Biden thought would be vindicated over time.

Hur concluded earlier this year that Biden “willfully retained” classified documents related to U.S. policy towards Afghanistan and notebook entries featuring classified national-security and military secrets. His final report on the investigation became another pivotal moment in Biden’s presidency because of Hur’s candid description of Biden’s apparent mental decline.

The political fallout from the poorly managed Afghanistan withdrawal is now haunting Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign because of the key role she claims to have played in the decision at the time. Aware of the political risk associated with the withdrawal decision, the Harris campaign is now blaming Trump for supposedly failing to give the Biden administration enough time to properly plan out the withdrawal.

Gold Star families of some of the deceased Marines have strongly criticized Harris for ignoring them and for her role in the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal. The families spoke at the Republican National Convention and praised Trump for meeting with them and hearing about their grief.

Trump appeared with the families at the Arlington National Cemetery marking the three year anniversary of the withdrawal, an event Democrats have scrutinized heavily because of an alleged confrontation between a cemetery staffer and the Trump campaign.