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- Biden officials told Axios that the Trump administration left a "bare cupboard" for the Afghanistan exit.
- The terms of the US's messy Afghanistan withdrawal were negotiated under Trump.
- "There was no interagency planning on how to execute a withdrawal," one official told Axios of Trump's team.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Biden administration officials are pointing the finger at their predecessors in former President Donald Trump's administration over the US's rocky exit from Afghanistan, Axios reports.
A high-stakes blame game is underway between federal agencies and other stakeholders over the chaotic withdrawal.
The virtual overnight collapse of the US-backed Afghan government and swift takeover of the country by the Taliban caught the administration off guard and led to a mad dash to evacuate US Embassy personnel and other US citizens in Afghanistan.
The conditions of the US's withdrawal from Afghanistan were negotiated under Trump, who negotiated a deal with the Taliban in February 2020 to withdraw all US troops within the next 14 months – by May 2021.
"There was no plan to evacuate our diplomats to the airport," a senior Biden administration national security official told Axios. "None of this was on the shelf, so to speak."
The official added: "When we got in, on Jan. 20, we saw that the cupboard was bare."
The chaos and disarray of the US's exit was encapsulated in a stream of harrowing videos and photos from Hamid Karzai Airport in Kabul of desperate Afghan civilians crowding the tarmac, scaling jetways, and even trying to climb onto US military planes. Seven people, including at least one who fell from the sky after clinging to a departing plane, died as a result of the mayhem.
Flights in and out of Kabul have now resumed after order was restored to the airport, administration officials say, with Pentagon press secretary John Kirby saying on Tuesday that the US has the capacity to evacuate 5,000 to 9,000 people per day. Approximately 5,000 to 10,000 Americans remain in the country, Kirby told CNN.
The fates of tens of thousands of Afghan citizens who fought alongside US and coalition forces as contractors and interpreters eligible for Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) to the US, in addition to other vulnerable Afghanis who stand to be top targets of the Taliban, hang in the balance.
While some Afghanis in that category have been evacuated already, thousands more find themselves stuck in a purgatory of bureaucratic red tape to get the necessary paperwork to leave, drawing sharp criticism from members of Congress, Afghanistan war veterans, and advocates.
The Biden administration says the bureaucratic holdup is a result of Trump's last-minute effort to pull all troops out of Afghanistan before the end of his presidency previously reported by Axios, saying that after that, "the entire policy process had atrophied."
"On the one hand, they set a May deadline for withdrawal," another official told Axios. "On the other hand, there was no interagency planning on how to execute a withdrawal."
In a Monday speech, Biden reiterated that he stands by his decision to exit from Afghanistan and doubled down on his long-held position that the war was unwinnable. But some allies and commentators accused Biden of not directly addressing the criticism leveled at the logistics of the withdrawal.
Biden's claim that "some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier," for example, confounded experts and advocates who were quick to point out the estimated backlog of 18,000 outstanding SIV applications from eligible Afghan citizens and nearly 53,000 applications for their family members.
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