It is an iron law that if governments put out important documents just ahead of a long holiday weekend there is something fishy about them. So it was with President Biden’s decision to release a report on America’s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan on Thursday, before the Easter weekend. The White House press corps had about ten minutes to read it before a briefing where the first questioner, channelling Gilbert and Sullivan’s modern major-general, described it as the ‘very definition of a modern major holiday news dump.’

Biden may be the only person in the world who does not see the withdrawal from Afghanistan as being a critical failure of his administration

The report is a thin 12-page self-justification for the decisions made before and during the catastrophic withdrawal, selectively drawing on material gathered from after-action reviews across government. At the same time the State Department and the Pentagon sent their own reviews to relevant committees in Congress.

While the details of these reviews have not been made public, a lot of the raw material has already appeared elsewhere, and is highly critical of Biden’s decision-making, which makes it extraordinarily naïve of the White House to think its simplistic defence of its actions would have any credibility.

As far as the decision to withdraw is concerned, it was made against the clear advice of the US military, not that you would know it from reading the White House excuses. That advice went all the way to the top, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, who was clear in evidence to Congress, ‘I recommended that we maintain 2,500 troops in Afghanistan.’

The White House report claims there was ‘intensive consultation with allies,’ over the withdrawal plan. But Britain’s Defence Secretary Ben Wallace was unusually frank at the time, considering the importance of this alliance, in admitting his reservations about the withdrawal. While American troops were the largest national contingent, they were only about one quarter of the whole international force then numbering around 10,000. Security in Kabul was managed by British troops, the airport was held by Turks, and there were German troops in the north and Italians in the west.

The international force did not only provide a basic security blanket for the country, but protection for some 17,000 contractors who kept Afghan combat aircraft flying, as well as other vital services for Afghan forces set up on a western model. When the contractors went, they took weapons systems with them and software that had enabled Afghan commanders to communicate and track thousands of vehicles. Suddenly they literally did not know where their troops or equipment were. The collapse was not, as Biden said, an unwillingness to fight, but a loss of capacity. The commander in Helmand province in the south, Sami Sadat, an actual major general, admitted that the Afghan army was not without its problems, ‘but we ultimately stopped fighting because our partners already had.’

Sadat had already witnessed one American betrayal in the Doha deal signed under President Trump in 2020. This one-sided deal, made without the consent of the elected Afghan government, forced the release of 5,000 high-value Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners, many of whom Sadat had put in jail. And at the same time Afghan commanders were told to ‘give peace a chance,’ pulling back from planned offensives across the 2020 fighting season, apparently to allow for the Afghan government to negotiate with the Taliban – a process which went nowhere.

In his blind contempt for Afghanistan and Afghans, Joe Biden has never conceded these factors. The White House report blames his predecessor President Trump and the Afghan armed forces for the disaster, taking no responsibility for the collapse. You wonder if the people putting it out believe this stuff. Biden may be the only person in the world who does not see the withdrawal from Afghanistan as being a critical foreign policy failure of his administration.

The White House report claims there was no intelligence that the Taliban were so close to taking Kabul, but that is at variance to what the commander on the ground Rear Admiral Peter Vasely has said. According to a huge 2,000-page US army investigation, released to the media after a Freedom of Information request, he said there was ‘lack of understanding of what was going on,’ and the military would have been ‘much better prepared to conduct a more orderly’ evacuation, if Washington had paid attention to the ‘indicators of what was happening on the ground.’

Vasely also criticised the State Department for wanting to keep its personnel working at the embassy and not having a realistic sense of the imminence of the collapse. Another unnamed military officer said the State Department had built ‘a narrative supported by half-truths, decoupled from reality.’ None of this is reflected in the White House report which sees only sweetness and light across the administration and careful preparations for all contingencies, ‘including a rapid deterioration of the security situation.’

Apart from handing a country of nearly 40 million people back to the violent, small-minded, misogynistic Taliban movement which rules only by fear, the consequences of the withdrawal have proved to be grave for the security of the world. The White House report points to Biden’s willingness to project force ‘over the horizon’ in killing the al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul in July last year. But there is no advantage in killing one leader while leaving Afghanistan a safe haven for his followers. There are now thousands of foreign fighters in Afghanistan, and the new leader of al Qaeda, Saif al-Adel, moves freely between Iran and Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.

This too was foreseen in an influential report by a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joe Dunford, who also commanded in Afghanistan, soon after President Biden took office in 2021. He recommended a small American force, alongside allies, should be kept in Afghanistan as an insurance policy for the medium term.

The decision to withdraw from Afghanistan handed al Qaeda victory in the war on terror declared four presidents ago by George W. Bush, encouraged dictators everywhere, such as Vladimir Putin, to believe America weak, and betrayed the hopes of a generation of Afghans.

It is to be hoped that America’s Afghanistan War Commission, set up to look at the whole campaign, and various congressional committees will draw on better evidence than the Panglossian, one-sided document that crept out of the White House before the Easter holiday.