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The Biden administration’s August 2021 bugout from Afghanistan was “abrupt and uncoordinated,” giving locals the impression the US “was merely handing Afghanistan over to a Taliban government-in-waiting,” in keeping with a scathing watchdog report launched Monday.
The report by the Particular Inspector Common for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) discovered the withdrawal introduced by President Biden in April of that yr “destroyed the morale of Afghan troopers and police” who had “lengthy relied on the US navy’s presence” for their very own safety — in addition to to make sure the Kabul authorities paid their salaries.
Watchdog John F. Sopko additionally faulted the 2020 Doha Settlement reached between the Trump administration and the Taliban for instilling “a way of abandonment” in each the Afghan forces and public at giant.
“The US-Taliban settlement gave the Taliban its core demand: the entire withdrawal of US and coalition troops, in addition to contractors,” the report acknowledged. “The Afghan authorities, a nonsignatory to the settlement, was excluded from negotiations, legitimating the Taliban on the world stage and additional undercutting the Afghan authorities’s credibility, which many Afghans already considered as illegitimate.”
In the meantime, the Western-backed Kabul authorities, led by President Ashraf Ghani, believed the US wouldn't full its pullout till an all-Afghan peace deal had been agreed. In accordance with SIGAR, Ghani “learn the [Doha] settlement because the conditions-based peace deal it presupposed to be, not the calendar-based withdrawal deal that it had grow to be.”
Due to that, Ghani’s former nationwide safety adviser Hamdullah Mohib informed the watchdog, Biden’s withdrawal announcement “was a shock to us as a result of previous to that … US officers had persistently—at each alternative—assured the Afghan authorities that they had been dedicated to an ‘unbiased and democratic Afghanistan’
“They insisted that they needed a peaceable Afghanistan wherein the good points of the final 20 years could be preserved,” Mohib added. “They maintained this place till the very finish.”
In the meantime, the evacuation of US contractors left the Afghan navy unable to produce or preserve their very own forces, leaving them helpless within the face of the Taliban onslaught.
“We constructed that military to run on contractor help,” mentioned retired Military Lt. Gen. David Barno, the previous commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan. “With out it, it might’t operate. Sport over … When the contractors pulled out, it was like we pulled all of the stands out of the Jenga pile and anticipated it to remain up.”
SIGAR additionally mentioned the Pentagon didn't correctly account for weapons and tools it supplied to Afghanistan’s navy.
Greater than $7 billion price of US-provided navy tools fell into the palms of the Taliban because of this, the Protection Division’s inspector common estimated in a report final yr. The US had spent $18.6 billion arming the Afghanistan navy since 2002, in keeping with the IG report.
Within the introduction to his report, Sopko accused the Protection and State Departments of stonewalling him, saying that the departments declined to evaluation an interim model of the report concern final yr, “denied us entry to their workers, and largely declined to reply requests for info. This restricted SIGAR’s capacity to carry out this analysis.”
The Pentagon, in feedback it submitted to SIGAR, pushed again on the assertion that it saved the Afghans at the hours of darkness about their withdrawal plans, saying: “On the contrary, US officers continued to have interaction the Afghan management all through 2020 and 2021 to reassure them that the ANDSF was a really succesful pressure and that the US would proceed to supply safety help to the ANDSF even after the withdrawal.”
Sopko fired again: “DOD could also be mistaking SIGAR’s evaluation of what Afghan officers heard with what U.S. officers had been saying. Certainly, it seems what stunned Afghan officers was not the absence of communication, however reasonably what was being communicated. The report describes what number of senior Afghan officers had been unwilling to consider that the US was going to totally withdraw regardless of repeated indicators from the US.”
The Pentagon’s Afghanistan spokesman, Military Lt. Col. Rob Lodewick informed The Put up that the Protection Division was “properly conscious” of the IG report and “contributed to and facilitated their work.”
“Whereas we take exception to SIGAR’s assertions of non-cooperation, and handle them accordingly … the Division will proceed to facilitate SIGAR’s work shifting ahead for safety and protection associated issues regarding Afghanistan,” he mentioned.
Congress commissioned the particular inspector common’s report weeks after the autumn of Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021.
In a transfer certain to reignite oversight considerations about US support to Ukraine, the inspector common warned that errors involving abuse of funds in Afghanistan may reoccur within the European battle.
“Given the continuing battle and the unprecedented quantity of weapons being transferred to Ukraine, the chance that some tools finally ends up on the black market or within the improper palms is probably going unavoidable,” Sopko mentioned.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) mentioned on Twitter the IG report “exhibits but once more what a catastrophe Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan was — and billions of taxpayer dollars wasted.”
A 2022 report by the Home International Affairs Committee discovered greater than 1,000 People had been additionally stranded in Afghanistan on the time of the withdrawal.
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