The National Security Council released an assessment of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan on Thursday that attempted to explain why the withdrawal unfolded so chaotically. The report mainly places the responsibility on former President Donald Trump. Some of its gripes are justified. Yet overall the document deflects blame from President Joe Biden and obscures bigger, structural problems at the root of American failings. After all, the U.S. was withdrawing from a two-decade war that it had lost and an attempt at nation-building that had gone poorly — a legacy of failure that long predated Trump.
The general tone of the paper is defensive rather than evaluative.
Experts say that the NSC document reads more like a set of talking points than a sober, independent-minded assessment of what went wrong. “It isn’t an objective attempt to identify or summarize lessons learned,” tweeted Jonathan Schroden, who directs the Countering Threats and Challenges Program at the Center for Naval Analyses. “It is a political document designed to deflect blame in advance of a gathering storm of House GOP hearings.” Indeed, the general tone of the paper is defensive rather than evaluative — and an attempt to save face for an administration seeking re-election.
The NSC review does make some fair points about how the administration was dealt a difficult hand. Trump left Biden without adequate strategic plans on how to conduct the withdrawal — originally scheduled to take place in May 2021, a few months after Biden took office.
And the document’s complaints that the terms of Trump’s withdrawal deal with the Taliban put the Biden administration in a difficult position are also fair. As Anand Gopal, the author of “No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes,” told me in 2021, the fact that the U.S. struck a deal directly with the Taliban and left the fragile Afghan government to sort out a peace process with the Taliban on its…
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