The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | ‘Shameful’: Expert Assails State Department on Afghanistan ‘After Action’ Report

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

The State Department has released an After Action Review on Afghanistannearly two years after the U.S.’ catastrophic military withdrawal from that country, which concluded on Aug. 30, 2021. The report was released following a 90-day review and included more than “150 interviews with current and former State Department officials at all levels of the organization and reviewed relevant documents and other materials.” The State Department released the report, finalized in March 2022, on June 30.  “It’s just shameful, and starting with the timing of the release, they dropped it on the afternoon of the Friday before the 4th of July, which is just a naked attempt to bury it, to not have anybody pay attention to it,” says Victoria Coates, a senior research fellow in international affairs and national security at The Heritage Foundation. “But fortunately, there is such interest in this topic that they can’t. They can’t hide how bad this is and this is their own people doing the reporting.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)  Coates adds: The State Department was shifting blame to the Department of Defense, and basically nobody wanted to be left holding the bag. And what the result was, was 13 dead American heroes in Kabul that didn’t need to be sacrificed.Coates joins today’s episode of “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the State Department’s report and her thoughts on the timing of its release, as well as on the end of Israel’s recent military operation in the West Bank city of Jenin. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We'd love to talk, business. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, July 7th. I'm Samantha Sherriss, and joining today's show is Victoria Coates, senior research fellow in international affairs and national security at the Heritage Foundation. The State Department recently released a report titled After Action Review on Afghanistan, nearly two years after the U.S.'s catastrophic withdrawal from the country. The report was released following a 90-day review and included over 150 interviews with current and former State Department officials at all levels of the organization and reviewed

relevant documents and other materials. Victoria joins today's episode of the Daily Signal podcast to further discuss the report's findings, the timing of the report's release, and much more. We'll get to my conversation with Victoria Coates right after this. Conservative women are problematic women. Why? Because we don't adhere to the agenda of the radical left. Every Thursday morning on the Problematic Women podcast, Kristen I-Cammer, Lauren Evans, and me, Virginia Allen, are joined by other conservative women to break down the big issues and news you care about. Whether you're interested in hot takes and conversations on pop culture or what Congress is up to, Problematic Women has you covered. We sort through the news

to keep you up to date on the issues that are of particular interest to conservative leaning, that is problematic women. Find problematic women wherever you like to listen to podcasts and follow the show on Instagram. Joining today's episode is Victoria Coates, Senior Research Fellow in International Affairs and National Security at the Heritage Foundation. Victoria, thanks for joining us again. Of course. So one week ago, the State Department released a report titled After Action Review on Afghanistan, which details the U.S. withdrawal from a...

Afghanistan. According to the Washington Post, the report faults the agency's crisis management and awareness before and during the fall of Afghanistan. First and foremost, can you walk us through some of the key findings of this report? Yeah, it's just shameful. And starting with the timing of the release, they dropped it on the afternoon of the Friday before the 4th of July, which is just a naked attempt to bury it, to not have anybody pay attention to it. But fortunately, there is such interest in this topic that they can't. They can't hide how bad this is. And this is their own people doing the reporting. So I think they tried mightily to be as sympathetic as they could. And they did blame the Trump administration, which had been out of office for 10 months and had

not departed from Afghanistan before President Trump left office, but they tried to blame. Blame us anyway for it, but nothing can hide what was apparently a completely disorganized, rudderless drawdown of American troops with no leadership. Nobody wanted to own this thing, obviously. And so the White House was providing no direction. The State Department was shifting blame to the Department of Defense, and basically nobody wanted to be left holding the bag and what the result was with, you know, 13 dead American heroes in Kabul that didn't need, didn't need to be sacrificed.

Yes, definitely. And as you just mentioned, it was released before the July 4th weekend. Many people had off on Monday going into a long weekend. What was interesting for me, at least, was that this report was dated March of 2022. So not even that it was completely. and released right away, it was almost, it was more than a year that it was held. Why do you think it took so long for the report to be released in the first place? Well, obviously, they didn't want to release it.

You know, it is damning. But also bear in mind, we only have a quarter of the report. Three quarters of it was redacted on security grounds as containing very sensitive information. And I have to wonder what that is. I mean, clearly the Taliban. knows what's in that report. So it sort of seems to me the American people could know as well. So we only have a fraction of it.

As you said, it was completed over a year ago. And then amazingly, they dropped it on Friday before the 4th of July. So the whole thing just doesn't pass the smell test. They know, the administration knows perfectly well that the president's poll numbers tanked right after Afghanistan. And they've never recovered. He can insist all he wants that this was a great success. but the American people know otherwise. And just speaking of the administration, it's hard to believe that it's almost two years

since the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan. Do you think anyone in the Biden administration, given the amount of time that has passed, will be held accountable for what went down, what happened in Afghanistan? It certainly doesn't seem so. You know, the president just last week made this claim that there's no al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. which it, again, doesn't pass the smell test. Of course, there's al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. They were, you know, senior folks were moving back in as the U.S. came out.

And so, you know, the president is sort of delusional about what's going on, and it's insisting it was a success. It was what he had campaigned on, and so it's what he did. Then why would they hold anyone else accountable? I mean, they think it was, it was well done in their opinion. the inconvenient facts of this report notwithstanding. And just looking at, you know, more of the specifics of the report, if you were to kind of pick the most significant or sort of the most shocking takeaway,

what would that be for you? Really, the lack of coordination, you know, that this is with the National Security Council staff, and maybe that's my own particular background talking, but that this is precisely what the NSC is designed. to do because if you look at a problem like this and the president's given you direction, it's an interagency problem. And if you as the NSC are not creating a very solid plan and issuing direction to the departments and agencies, they will naturally do what was done, which is they're going to shift,

try to shift the blame between each other, try to do as little work as possible and, you know, sweep the whole thing under the rug. So this goes right up to the top. This goes to the White House and the fact that the president would give these orders and then abdicate his responsibility to see them executed in an orderly fashion that was as safe as possible for both Americans and for the Afghans who had helped us. He just let all those lives go to risk. And that, to me, is just a shocking dereliction of duty.

And hopefully this will, the situation that happened in Afghanistan will never happen again. But looking forward to, you know, potential, you know, if this were ever, if we did ever find ourselves in a similar situation with having to withdraw from somewhere, what should if it, you know, happens in this administration, what should the Biden administration and even future administrations learn from this specific report? and, you know, what happened in Afghanistan almost two years ago? Well, what's that old saying that history doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes? You know, and I think we all, you know, in August of 2021, we're painfully reminded of the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War and a similar, you know, sort of chaotic scene of the United States retreating in some disarray. And so, again, the president insisting it won't be like Saigon, then it was like Saigon.

He had done nothing to prepare for it. And there are tons of things you can do. You know, you could start by not giving up your personal airfield outside of Kabul and creating a situation where you're going to have to rely on the Taliban to give you security for Kabul International Airport. So we should have kept Saigram as our basis for the evacuation. if we were going to evacuate, and then we have tremendous logistical capabilities within particularly the Department of Defense. And so you need a, you know, a logistics supply chain general to be in charge of that. You know, and the president would need to very personally say,

you know, you are the go-to person, you are in charge, you run this thing. And DOD can do that all day long, but they just need the direction. They need the personal intervention of the president and a clear plan. But there's no reason that this should ever happen again. Now, we've been discussing a lot about what happened in the past in terms of Afghanistan. And I wanted to just shift a little bit and talk about the present situation in Afghanistan. And if you could kind of give us a little insight into what the country looks like now and just sort of the status of what's going on there.

No, it's extremely sad. And, you know, one of the sort of byproducts of the 20-year American presence in Afghanistan was, you know, an increasing liberalization of that society, educational institutions, particularly for women and girls, some start at a judicial system. And all of that is gone. You know, the Taliban are determined to take Afghanistan back to the Middle Ages. They have been systematically demolishing any opportunities, particularly for women, but then for anything cultural or historic. These are the folks who participated in the blowing up of the gigantic Buddhas 30 years ago.

So they're unchanged, and they are taking Afghanistan, as I said, back to the Middle Ages. The United States continues to try to get humanitarian aid in and to get the, the Afghans who are still there who want to get out out. It's not clear how much of that is being siphoned off. The aid is being siphoned off by the Taliban, but certainly they have the opportunity to do that and basically be subsidized by U.S. tax fares, which is certainly not a desirable state of fares. And one of the criticisms of when the U.S. left was the fact that there were both U.S. citizens

and Afghan allies that were left behind. Do you happen to know how many U.S. citizens are still in Afghanistan and how many of our Afghan allies are, you know, still there? It's very hard to tell. You know, I've seen estimates, the State Department will tell you it's a couple hundred. I've heard thousands. So that number is going to be hard to pin down, but there shouldn't be any. You know, we really should not be leaving, particularly our citizens, but then our allies in this kind of. kind of incredibly dangerous situation that we created, essentially. And so the fact that the

administration has been slow walking any attempts to get those folks out and has not resolved a lot of the visa issues that I've been hearing about for folks who have gotten to the United States is, again, really shameful. Now, I just want to pivot to two other topics while we have you. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is currently in China for a four-day visit. According to the Treasury Department, while in Beijing, Secretary Yellen will discuss with PRC officials the importance for our countries as the world's two largest economies to responsibly manage our relationship, communicate directly about areas of concern, and work together to address global challenges. What do you hope that the Secretary addresses or accomplishes during this four-day trip?

Well, I was hoping she wouldn't go. I mean, both this and Secretary Blinken's trip, just ill-advised attempt to create some kind of cooperation with the People's Republic of China when Beijing had absolutely no interest in cooperation. Everything they're actually doing is extremely hostile and challenging to the United States. And the sooner we realize that and stop trying to go on these charm offenses, the better. I mean, the Treasury Secretary would be doing much better to be going over to London to negotiate a financial free trade deal with the UK than going to Beijing to try to get cooperation on Ukraine or climate, which are the two things I think they're hoping for. But the problem is that China has no interest in cooperating with us on Ukraine or climate. So they may say some nice things to string us along, but they're not going to do anything that's materially helpful. So I would see this truck is just a waste of taxpayer dollars.

And just another topic that I wanted to get your thoughts on is Israel's military operation that just ended. ABC News is reporting that the operation lasted 48 hours and included drone airstrikes, hundreds of special forces and tanks. What was the purpose of this operation in the first place? And, yeah, if you could just break down more about this operation and what we know after it. Yeah, the operation took place in the so-called West Bank in the refugee camp of Jenin, which is a camp of about 17,000, which does have a United Nations presence in terms of medical facilities and schools. is a hotbed of Iranian-sponsored terrorism against Israel.

And this has been the most extensive operation in Jenna in 20 years. And so this is a big deal. And the reason it happened is this past year has been the deadliest year for both Israelis and Palestinians in decades. And I think you can draw a direct line between, you know, what the uptick in violence that has taken place in 2020, 2020, 2022, 2023 time frame. And the hundreds of millions of dollars, it's now, I think, over a billion dollars

that the Biden administration started pouring into Palestinian-related institutions right after they came into office in 2021. They say their intentions were the best that they wanted to fund schools and hospitals. They wanted to provide economic opportunity. But what we found is provide, provide unfettered resources into these communities, the Iranians hijack it, and use it as a means to sponsor terrorism against Israelis.

And that's what Prime Minister Netanyahu decided was intolerable. And he launched this exercise. And hopefully it will be effective and will have much reduced violence in Israel going forward. Well, Victoria, thank you so much for joining me today. Just before we go, I wanted to give you the opportunity to share any final thoughts on, you know, the Afghanistan report or any of the other topics that we discussed. No, I think I really appreciate it. And I'm hopeful that at some point, Samantha, I'll come on and have some good news to discuss with you. I feel like I'm kind of a bad news buffet when I come on.

But I think keeping a attention on the Afghanistan report, I think asking for the redacted passages to be reviewed and hopefully released so we can get a really full picture of what happened as we approach the second anniversary is critical. I think the president on down, this administration has to be held accountable for this. And, you know, if the president won't hold his people accountable, then the American people need to, through Congress, continue to demand information on this. Absolutely. Victoria Coates, thank you so much for joining us. Always a pleasure to have you. Thanks so much. Thanks, Samantha. And that's going to do it for today's episode. Thank you for listening to my interview with Victoria Coates.

We'll be sure to leave a link to the State Department's report in today's show notes for anyone who's interested in checking it out. In the meantime, if you haven't gotten a chance, make sure you subscribe to the Daily Signal wherever you get your podcast and help us reach even more listeners by leaving a five-star rating and review. We read and appreciate all of your feedback. Thanks again for listening. Have a great Friday.

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