The White House on Thursday released a long‑awaited review of the U.S. exit from Afghanistan, assigning blame to former President Donald Trump and citing a major intelligence failure, while defending the overall conduct of the operation. The classified review was sent to Congress, where the Republican‑controlled House is investigating what it describes as President Joe Biden’s failures during the August 2021 withdrawal. In a declassified summary, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby acknowledged mistakes in the exit, which saw the Taliban seize control within weeks and forced the last American troops and their allies into a desperate evacuation. “Ending a war, any war, is not an easy endeavor, certainly not after 20 years,” Kirby told reporters. “It doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth doing—ending that war in Afghanistan.”
The White House largely blamed Biden’s predecessor for creating the conditions that led to the rout, but also admitted that U.S. intelligence services failed to grasp the Taliban’s strength and the weakness of Afghan government forces that Western nations had spent years propping up. “Clearly we didn’t get things right” on intelligence, Kirby said. The report’s summary added that nothing “would have changed the trajectory” of the exit and that “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 pullout, which concluded on August 30, 2021, shocked Americans and allies as the Taliban swept aside Western‑trained Afghan forces within weeks. A suicide bomb attack on August 26 killed 13 U.S. troops and 170 Afghans at the crowded perimeter of Kabul’s international airport, where an unprecedented airlift managed to evacuate more than 120,000 people in a matter of days. Before U.S. forces could secure the entire airport, the world witnessed tragic scenes of panicked Afghan civilians mobbing airliners and falling to their deaths while trying to cling to departing planes.
In the summary, the White House placed heavy blame on a February 2020 deal struck between the Trump administration and the Taliban, saying it left the incoming Biden government in an impossible position. “The departing Trump administration left the Biden administration with a date for withdrawal but no plan for executing it. After four years of neglect—and in some cases deliberate degradation—crucial systems, offices, and agency functions necessary for a safe and orderly departure were in disrepair,” the document read. It also noted that Trump had steadily reduced the U.S. troop presence in his final 11 months, leaving only 2,500 personnel when Biden took office in January 2021. “As a result… the Taliban were in the strongest military position they had been in since 2001,” when the United States first invaded Afghanistan to target the planners of the September 11 attacks.
Trump, posting on his Truth Social app, called the current White House “morons” and said they were responsible for a “grossly incompetent SURRENDER in Afghanistan.” “Biden is responsible, no one else!” he wrote.
Kirby acknowledged a litany of intelligence failures, noting that the U.S. government did not predict “how fast the Taliban were moving across the country” or “the degree to which they were constructing these deals in the hinterlands that kind of fell like dominos.” He added, “We didn’t anticipate how fast the Afghan national security forces were going to fold,” and “I don’t think we fully appreciated the degree of corruption that was in the officer ranks in the military.” “Intelligence is a hard business and they get it right a lot too,” Kirby said.
Ultimately, the White House report suggested that the long‑term failure of the war—highlighted by the Taliban’s resilience and the weakness of government forces—meant the ending was never going to go well. “After more than 20 years, more than $2 trillion, 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 U.S. military presence—that would have changed the trajectory,” it concluded.
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