President Joe Biden's administration has laid the blame on his predecessor, Donald Trump, for the deadly and chaotic 2021 withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan that brought about some of the darkest moments of Mr Biden's presidency.
The White House publicly released a 12-page summary of the results of the so-called "hotwash" of US policies around the ending of the nation's longest war, taking little responsibility for its own actions and asserting that Mr Biden was "severely constrained" by Mr Trump's previous decisions.
It does acknowledge that the evacuation of Americans and allies from Afghanistan should have started sooner, but blames the delays on the Afghan government and military, and on US military and intelligence community assessments.
That brief document was drafted by the National Security Council, rather than by an independent entity, with input from Mr Biden himself.
The administration said detailed reviews conducted by the State Department and the Pentagon — which the White House said would be transmitted privately to Congress on Thursday — were highly classified and would not be released publicly.
"President Biden's choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor," the White House summary states, noting that when Mr Biden entered office, "the Taliban were in the strongest military position that they had been in since 2001, controlling or contesting nearly half of the country".
The report does fault overly optimistic intelligence community assessments about the Afghan army's willingness to fight, and says Mr Biden followed military commanders' recommendations for the pacing of the drawdown of US forces.
"Clearly we didn't get it right," National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Thursday, local time, but sidestepped questions about whether Mr Biden had any regrets for his decisions and actions leading up to the withdrawal.
Mr Kirby said of the report that "the purpose of it is not accountability", but rather "understanding" what happened, to inform future decisions.
Mistakes in Afghanistan inform handling of Ukraine
The White House asserts that the mistakes in Afghanistan had informed its handling of Ukraine, where the Biden administration has been credited for supporting Kyiv's defence against Russia's invasion.
It says the White House simulated worst-case scenarios prior to the February 2022 invasion and moved to release intelligence about Moscow's intentions months beforehand.
"We now prioritise earlier evacuations when faced with a degrading security situation," the White House said.
In an apparent attempt to defend its national security decision-making, the Biden administration also notes that it had released pre-war warnings over "strong objections from senior officials in the Ukrainian government".
Republicans in Congress have sharply criticised the Afghanistan withdrawal, focusing on the deaths of 13 service members in a suicide bombing at Kabul's airport, which also killed more than 100 Afghans.
Former Marine Sergeant Tyler Vargas-Andrews — who was badly wounded in the explosion — told a congressional hearing last month that the withdrawal "was a catastrophe" and "there was an inexcusable lack of accountability".
The administration's report appears to shift any blame in the August 26, 2021, suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport, saying it was the US military that made one possibly key decision.
"To manage the potential threat of a terrorist attack, the president repeatedly asked whether the military required additional support to carry out their mission at HKIA," the report said.
"Senior military officials confirmed that they had sufficient resources and authorities to mitigate threats."
Mr Kirby credited US forces for their actions in running the largest airborne evacuation of non-combatants in history during the chaos of Kabul's fall.
"They ended our nation's longest war," he told reporters. "That was never going to be an easy thing to do. And, as the president himself has said, it was never going to be low-grade or low-risk or low-cost."
Shifting blame
Since the US withdrawal, Mr Biden has blamed the February 2020 agreement that Mr Trump reached with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, saying it had boxed the US into leaving the country.
That agreement gave the Taliban significant legitimacy and has been blamed by analysts for undercutting the US-backed government, which would collapse so quickly a year later.
The Afghan government released roughly 5,000 Taliban prisoners after the Doha agreement as a condition of having peace talks with the Taliban.
Mr Kirby noted that release and other examples of what he said was a "general sense of degradation and neglect" inherited by Mr Biden.
However, the agreement also gave the US the right to withdraw from the accord if Afghan peace talks failed, which they did.
The agreement required the US to remove all forces by May 1, 2021.
Mr Biden pushed a full withdrawal to September but declined to delay further, saying it would prolong a war that had long needed to end.
Since the withdrawal, the US has carried out a successful operation to kill al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri — the group's Number 2 leader during the September 11 attacks — which, the White House has argued, is proof it can still deter terrorist groups in Afghanistan.
However, the images of disorder and violence during the fall of Kabul still reverberate, including scenes of Afghans falling from the undercarriages of American planes, Afghan families handing infants over airport gates to save them from the crush and violence of the crowd, and the devastation after the suicide bombing at the Abbey Gate.
'I just won't buy the argument of chaos'
A February report by the US government's special inspector for Afghanistan placed the most immediate blame for the Afghan military's collapse on both the Trump and Biden administrations, and cited the speed with which Mr Biden insisted on carrying out the withdrawal.
"Due to the (Afghan security force's) dependency on US military forces, the decision to withdraw all US military personnel and dramatically reduce US support to the (Afghan security forces) destroyed the morale of Afghan soldiers and police," the report said.
Pressed by reporters on Thursday afternoon, Mr Kirby repeatedly defended the US response and its effort to withdraw American citizens, and argued with reporters who referred to the withdrawal as chaotic. At one point, he paused in what appeared to be an effort to gather his emotions.
"For all this talk of chaos, I just didn't see it, not from my perch," said Mr Kirby, who was the Pentagon spokesman during the withdrawal.
"At one point during the evacuation, there was an aircraft taking off full of people, Americans and Afghans alike, every 48 minutes, and not one single mission was missed. So I'm sorry, I just won't buy the whole argument of chaos."
Mr Biden will not declassify portions of the report itself, Mr Kirby said, citing the ongoing work of a bipartisan Afghanistan war commission and the sensitivity of the documents.
The completion of the NSC review comes as the State Department and House Republicans battle over documents for classified cables relating to the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Last week, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mike McCaul, took an unprecedented step in issuing a subpoena for Secretary of State Antony Blinken for a cable written by dozens of diplomats at the US Embassy in Kabul shortly before the withdrawal.
The July 2021 communication reportedly warned Mr Blinken about the potential fall of Kabul via a special "dissent channel", which allows State Department officials to issue warnings or express contrarian views directly to senior agency officials.
AP
