President Biden was insistent that the disastrous withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan in August 2021 — which led to the deaths of 13 US service members — wasn’t a “mistake,” according to a forthcoming book.
In his book “The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore Foreign Policy After Trump,” Politico reporter Alexander Ward said “no one offered to resign” after the bugout “in large part because the president didn’t believe anyone had made a mistake.”
“Ending the war was always going to be messy,” Ward writes, according to excerpts that were reported by Axios.
“Biden told his top aides, [National Security Advisor Jake] Sullivan included, that he stood by them and they had done their best during a tough situation,” the excerpt reads, with one White House official saying, “There wasn’t even a real possibility of a shake-up.”
The book also shows that White House officials knew Biden’s promise to remove all American citizens before military members couldn’t be kept.
“There’s no one here who thinks we can meet that promise,” a senior White House official told Ward after the president committed to doing so on Aug. 18, 2021.
The president remains convinced as well that his decision to pull out of Afghanistan will be vindicated in time — despite two federal reports last year finding fault with his administration’s hasty removal of US troops.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, laid into the commander-in-chief following the report.
“If Biden is so proud of what he claims is his mistake-free performance in Afghanistan, he should say it to the nation,” Issa told The Post.
“Better yet, let him face the Gold Star families he still refuses to invite to the White House.”
Issa added that the president has repeatedly turned down invitations from his office to host the Gold Star families, two of whom were visiting Washington, D.C., on Thursday and met with the congressman.
The president previously met with the families during the service members’ dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base and with some on Memorial Day 2022.
On Aug. 26, 2021, a suicide bomber killed 13 service members in a terror attack at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport’s Abbey Gate, as US forces scrambled to evacuate American and Afghani citizens before the city fell to the Taliban.
More than 1,000 US citizens were left behind as a result — and tens of thousands of Afghan allies, including military personnel, interpreters and women leaders promised sanctuary by the US.
One of the Gold Star mothers, Kelly Barnett, has since claimed the Biden administration also lied about the conditions of her son’s death and she only learned the truth after speaking with eyewitnesses.
“They couldn’t tell us exactly. They changed his position where he was at when the blast went off on three of the DoD reports,” Darin Hoover, the father of that soldier, Marine Staff Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover, told The Post in an interview.
“As a parent of our lost son, it just angers me to no end that nobody — nobody from the State Department, nobody from the DoD, the Joint Chiefs — even stepped up when this stuff was going on and said, ‘Hey, time out. Are we doing the best thing that we can do?’” the dad said.
“And nobody laid down their stars, none of the generals did. Nobody threatened to resign. Nothing. And at this point, honestly … there’s some things that I wanna get off my chest and let the senile commander in chief know how I really feel.”
The decision has hurt Biden at the polls headed into an election year with a historically low job approval rating that has also been underwater since the Afghanistan withdrawal, FiveThirtyEight’s survey aggregator shows.
A February 2023 report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) called the evacuation “abrupt and uncoordinated” and said it was seen as effectively “handing” the nation “over to a Taliban government-in-waiting.”
SIGAR watchdog John F. Sopko in his report also blamed the February 2020 Doha Agreement signed off on by former President Donald Trump’s State Department for instilling “a sense of abandonment” in Afghanistan’s military.
“The Afghan government, a nonsignatory to the agreement, was excluded from negotiations, legitimating the Taliban on the world stage and further undercutting the Afghan government’s credibility, which many Afghans already viewed as illegitimate,” the report states.
US Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad told members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday that Biden placed no conditions on the agreement either before making his decision.
“He said to the world, we are pulling out. He was asked are there were conditions, he said unconditionally we are out regardless of the consequences, correct?” Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) asked the ambassador.
“I would have to say that he thought if he stayed that he would have to go back to war, likely to go back to war with the Taliban,” Khalilzad said.
Hoover, who watched the hearing from his home in Utah, told The Post: “When Ambassador Zalmay was in the hearing, he said there was three separate options for the withdrawal from Afghanistan: Keep the status quo, tear up the negotiated agreement with the Taliban or begin an unconditional withdrawal.”
“And what does he do? Goes with the unconditional withdrawal,” he said.
In June 2023, the State Department issued its own report blaming the Biden administration for not listening to the concerns of Afghan officials who warned that the Taliban would seize Kabul before the last US troops departed.
The agency was also insufficiently prepared to process more than 125,000 evacuees from the nation due to mismanagement and wrongly assuming “the security situation would not deteriorate substantially in Kabul for several months at the earliest.”
The excerpts from Ward’s book further reveal that Biden favored information he received from State Department officials as opposed to his Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, who pushed the president to keep troops in place longer.
Those agencies’ leaders continued to fight over a withdrawal strategy and whether to close the US embassy in Kabul — even after Biden’s withdrawal order in April 2021.
In a meeting the next month, Deputy Secretary of State for Management Brian McKeon said diplomats would be safe and that State Department officials had “a much higher risk tolerance” than Pentagon officials, according to one passage.
The perceived slight caused Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley to almost jump up from his chair but he “restrained himself from shouting how he and many serving in the armed forces had lost friends in war.”
“Austin showed no signs of anger, but he later told colleagues that he was offended by McKeon’s remark,” according to the book.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The 20-year conflict claimed the lives of more than 2,400 US service members and wounded more than 20,000.
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Josh Christenson
