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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday instructed the Pentagon to conduct a comprehensive review into the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
The Afghanistan pullout has largely been viewed as one of the most disastrous events of the Biden Presidency, as 13 U.S. service members were killed when a suicide bomber detonated outside the Kabul International Airport while evacuations were ongoing.
Disturbing images from the scene showed frantic Afghans racing to escape on the final cargo planes leaving the city, some of whom held on to the aircraft’s wheel wells and ended up falling to their deaths. The fall of Afghanistan almost identically mirrored the fall of South Vietnam and its capital of Saigon in 1975, an event that featured similar images of Vietnamese civilians and military personnel unsuccessfully scrambling to evacuate.
Biden faced intense scrutiny due to the rapid collapse of the Afghan National Army after he and senior administration officials, including then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken and then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, said the country would hold together for years.
On Tuesday current Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth vowed to conduct a thorough investigation into the withdrawal and the subsequent suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members.
“The Department of Defense has an obligation, both to the American people and to the warfighters who sacrificed their youth in Afghanistan, to get to the facts,” Hegseth wrote in a department memo. “This remains an important step toward regaining faith and trust with the American people and all those who wear the uniform and is prudent based on the number of casualties and equipment lost during the execution of this withdrawal operation.”
The defense secretary added that the Pentagon has already completed a review into the “catastrophic” withdrawal and concluded that a full investigation is necessary to fully grasp the scope of the disaster and hold relevant officials accountable.
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To that end, Hegseth is directing Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell to lead a special review panel aimed at evaluating past investigations and to “analyze the decision-making that led to one of America’s darkest and deadliest international moments.”
“This team will ensure ACCOUNTABILITY to the American people and the warfighters of our great Nation,” Hegseth wrote in the memo.
In a 2023 report addressing the Afghanistan withdrawal, the Biden Administration concluded that top intelligence officials did not accurately assess how quickly the Taliban would take control of Kabul.
A separate review conducted by Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee concluded that the Biden Administration “prioritized the optics of the withdrawal over the security of U.S. personnel on the ground,” according to the House Foreign Affairs Committee report.
“For that reason, they failed to plan for all contingencies, including a noncombatant evacuation operation (NEO) and refused to order a NEO until after the Taliban had already entered Kabul,” the report said.
In addition, the report concluded that the “failure” to establish adequate evacuation plans led to an unsecured environment at the airport that put U.S. service members and State Department employees at risk.
