Why did the Biden administration fail to get Afghan allies of its 20-year war there out of Afghanistan before the Taliban took over?
That, more so than President Biden’s decision to withdraw, is shaping up as a main point of contention between Biden and Congress. The United States has only rescued a fraction of the thousands of interpreters, fixers and other allies, and those left behind are in danger in a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
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While Biden stressed in an interview published Thursday the priority that is getting those people out — he estimated they number between 50,000 and 65,000 — there are massive logistical and timing challenges. And Biden seemed to implicitly acknowledge the limits of the unfolding campaign: “The commitment holds to get everyone out that, in fact, we can get out and everyone that should come out.”
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It’s looking like there will be investigations into this led by Democrats in Congress. Here are four early rationales for the slow evacuation, coming from the Biden administration and reporting on it, including by The Washington Post’s Anne Gearan, Tyler Pager, Jacqueline Alemany and Missy Ryan.
1. A backlog of visas
Perhaps the dominant defense is the most frustrating to hear for those stuck in Afghanistan: bureaucracy.
Most Afghans who want to come to the United States for safety need to apply for and receive what’s called a special immigrant visa. The Trump administration didn’t prioritize the office that processes these, and the Biden administration had a lot of work to do to get up to speed, say those familiar with the process.
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The Post reports that the Biden State Department had 17,000 backlogged visas when it took over, with wait times stretching into years. The State Department approved 137 of these visas in the first three months of the year, my colleagues report, then ramped up to 800 a week this summer.
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Congress tried to help. The administration identified specific problems with the visa process, and Congress relatively quickly passed a law attempting to fix them. (That underscores the bipartisan nature of the effort to get Afghan allies to the United States before the war ended.) But as Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline to leave the country neared, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle weren’t happy with the rate at which these visas were being issued.
4 key questions about Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal
2. A failure of intelligence and/or imagination
Biden has said he thought he had more time, yet he asserted they planned for every contingency. So, why weren’t they ready for when the worst-case scenario hit?
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Some Democrats privately expressed concern that the Biden administration was going on faulty intelligence. The Biden team put together a plan to evacuate Afghans this summer that seemed reasonable, according to a Democratic congressional staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly. But the administration failed to update it as the Taliban gained more power by the week.
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Just what kind of intelligence warnings the Biden administration received is another, closely related topic of hot debate. It was pretty widely believed in foreign policy communities that the Taliban would quite possibly take over Afghanistan after the Americans left, at some point. Biden’s top generals have said they didn’t see the takeover coming this quickly in the intelligence. The New York Times reported that intelligence this summer did warn of a quick collapse of the Afghan military, but it’s unclear how imminent they pitched it being or how confident they were.
The problem with intelligence is that leaders often demand timetables, and intelligence isn’t really in that game, said Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East policy expert now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Intelligence is more about providing probabilities, which made it hard to quantify how many weeks or months Afghanistan has before it collapses to the Taliban, for example.
3. Afghanistan’s government and people held Biden up
When he addressed the nation Monday, a day after the Taliban took control and deadly chaos reigned at the Kabul airport as afghans tried to get out, Biden offered a defense that caught some people involved in this off-guard. Some Afghan people didn’t want to leave the country so soon, he said. And the government advised against airlifting people out of the country en masse to avoid stirring up the hornet’s nest.
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“I know there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghan civilians sooner,” Biden said. “Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier, still hopeful for their country, and part of it is because the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, a crisis of confidence.”
But even some Democrats have raised eyebrows at that, pointing to long visa lines in Kabul as a vivid illustration that people did and do want to get out of the country.
4. A giant question mark … and accusations of playing politics
Republicans and Democrats alike are perplexed about why the Biden administration wasn’t more in a rush to evacuate people. The administration is filled with smart people with significant foreign policy experience, said one exasperated GOP congressional aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity. That includes the president. Biden was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as the United States was getting into Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Enter accusations of politics. The Post spoke to humanitarian workers who have been consulting with the Biden administration for months on Afghanistan. A number of them concluded that Biden didn’t like the optics of welcoming thousands of refugees when he was getting hit with GOP attacks about undocumented immigrants on the Southern border. July was the busiest month for illegal border crossings in 21 years.
(From the start of his presidency, Americans have given Biden poor marks on how he’s handled the border situation.)
The Biden administration strongly denies politics played a role. “We would never let the prospect of bad-faith criticism from the same people who orchestrated the Muslim [immigration] ban and decimated America’s refugee pipeline keep us from keeping faith with our Afghan partners,” a senior administration official told my colleagues.
But until the administration gives clearer answers on why it failed to get Afghan allies out sooner, suspicions will abound — and not just among their political foes.
Here’s Julián Castro, a former Cabinet secretary under the Obama administration, for example, using Afghan evacuations as a way to frame much of the Biden presidency when it comes to refugees.