W.House releases to Congress classified review of Afghan war withdrawal

The White House said Thursday it has handed Congress a long-awaited classified report on the 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan and defended the conduct of the traumatic exit, which ended 20 years of attempts to defeat the Taliban guerrillas.

Nothing "would have changed the trajectory" of the exit and "ultimately, President Biden refused to send another generation of Americans to fight a war that should have ended for the United States long ago," the White House National Security Council said.

The pullout, ending on August 30, 2021, shocked Americans and US allies as the Taliban swept aside Western-trained Afghan forces within weeks, forcing the last US troops to mount a desperate evacuation from Kabul's airport.

Thirteen US troops and 170 Afghans were killed in a suicide bomb attack at the crowded perimeter to the airport, where an unprecedented military airlift operation managed to get more than 120,000 people out of the country in a matter of days.

In a declassified summary of the report sent to Congress, the White House insisted that President Joe Biden's administration had done everything it could.

It blamed a deal struck previously between Donald Trump's administration and the Taliban for putting the incoming Biden government in an impossible position and it said that no intelligence agency had predicted such a catastrophic collapse of Afghan government forces.

"The departing Trump administration had left the Biden administration with a date for withdrawal, but no plan for executing it. And after four years of neglect -- and in some cases deliberate degradation -- crucial systems, offices, and agency functions that would be necessary for a safe and orderly departure were in disrepair," the document said.

"After more than 20 years, more than $2 trillion dollars, and standing up an Afghan army of 300,000 soldiers, the speed and ease with which the Taliban took control of Afghanistan suggests that there was no scenario -- except a permanent and significantly expanded US military presence -- that would have changed the trajectory," it said.