WASHINGTON, April 7. /TASS/. The administration of former US President Donald Trump drafted no clear plan for withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and is therefore responsible for mistakes committed by his successor Joe Biden in 2021, the White House said in a report, published on Thursday.
The administration will hand over a classified version of the document to the US Congress.
"President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor," the document says.
According to the report, when Trump took office in 2017, there were more than 10,000 US troops in Afghanistan. By the end of his presidential term, their number was reduced to 2,500.
"During the transition from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration, the outgoing Administration provided no plans for how to conduct the final withdrawal or to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies," the document says. "Indeed, there were no such plans in place when President Biden came into office, even with the agreed upon full withdrawal just over three months away."
"As a result, when President Biden took office on January 20, 2021, the Taliban [outlawed in Russia] were in the strongest military position that they had been in since 2001, controlling or contesting nearly half of the country. At the same time, the United States had only 2,500 troops on the ground, the lowest number of troops in Afghanistan since 2001," the report continues.
It refers to intelligence reports indicating that Taliban would have resumed its attacks on US and its allies if troops had not been withdrawn by May 2021.
In the White House’s opinion, further presence of US troops in Afghanistan would not change the situation in any way, so their withdrawal was imminent.
"Ultimately, after more than twenty 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," the report says.
US withdrawal from Afghanistan
The Taliban and the US administration led by then President Donald Trump signed a peace agreement in Qatar’s capital of Doha on February 29, 2020. According to the document, the US and coalition members were supposed to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan within 14 months. The Taliban, in turn, guaranteed that they would not use Afghan soil to carry out activities posing a security threat to the United States or its allies.
On April 14, 2021, US President Joe Biden announced his decision to end America’s military operation in Afghanistan - its longest abroad. The US launched the operation in October 2001. At the peak of hostilities, the number of US troops in the country exceeded 150,000 people. The bulk of US and NATO forces left the country in 2014.
After the United States announced plans for its troop pullout from Afghanistan, the Taliban (outlawed in Russia) embarked on a large-scale operation to take the country under its control. On August 15, Taliban fighters swept into Kabul without encountering any resistance and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani stepped down and fled the country. By early September 2021, all US forces left Afghanistan, ending their two-decade-long presence in the country.