White House Review Of 2021 Afghanistan Withdrawal Blames Trump

The White House pinned the chaotic 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan on the lack of planning from the previous administration and admitted it should have started evacuations sooner but stood by the decision to pull out of the country in a summary of an interagency report released Thursday.

The summary said that the administration was “severely constrained” by actions of former President Donald Trump’s administration, including the 2020 agreement Trump made with the Taliban to withdraw American troops by the spring of 2021.

While the summary acknowledged the evacuation of Americans should have begun sooner, it blamed delays on imperfect assessments from the intelligence community, the Afghan government and the Afghan military.