WASHINGTON: The US government and its partners have ultimately evacuated approximately 124,000 individuals, including 6,000 US citizens, in the weeks prior to suspending operations at the Kabul embassy on August 31, 2021, says an official report released on Thursday.

The report, prepared by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) of the US State Department, listed US government personnel, private US citizens, Afghans, and other at-risk individuals among those evacuated.

A State Department official told OIG that the criteria for eligible Afghans were unclear at the start of the evacuation but expanded as the evacuation evolved. Officials at the US Embassy, Kabul, told OIG that they were not provided a clear definition of “Afghans at risk” or “vulnerable Afghans” or the criteria for determining their eligibility for evacuation. When President Joe Biden announced that the United States would fully withdraw its troops from Afghanistan, he stated that the withdrawal would begin on May 1, 2021, and would be completed before Sept 11, 2021.

In its review, OIG found that in the intervening months, Embassy Kabul took some actions to prepare for potential emergencies, urging private US citizens to leave.

On April 27, 2021, Embassy Kabul posted an alert on its website noting the ordered departure from Embassy Kabul “of US government employees whose functions can be performed elsewhere due to increasing violence and threat reports in Kabul” and advised US citizens in Afghanistan to make plans to leave the country as soon as possible.

In a press conference on August 25, 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken noted that since March 2021, the department had issued 19 separate messages to Americans who had provided their contact information to the embassy, encouraging — and then urging — them to leave the country. The department also issued “Level 4 – Do Not Travel” advisories on its website and social media platforms warning of the dangerous conditions for US citizens in Afghanistan.

The report points out that In the months prior to and following President Biden’s April 14, 2021, announcement of US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, Taliban forces took large swaths of land, capturing their first provincial capital on August 6, 2021, and culminating with their August 15, 2021, entry into Kabul.

“As the Taliban entered Kabul, the Afghan president fled the country, and with his departure, the government, along with its security forces, collapsed,” the report adds.

According to the report, after the evacuation of the embassy compound, department personnel who remained at the Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) to assist evacuation efforts faced huge, uncontrollable crowds that formed daily. Amid the chaos, on August 26, 2021, a suicide bomber detonated an explosive device in the crowd outside Abbey Gate — one of the entrances to the airport — killing 13 US service members and many Afghans.

In their after-action report, management officers wrote: “Embassy Leadership did not wish to create panic and ensured that Management Notices and informational emails did not address the truly dire situation.” Because of this effort to avoid signaling a lack of support for the Afghan government, communication with embassy personnel about the timing and scope of a potential evacuation was unclear.

In one example, an official told OIG that the Ambassador reprimanded embassy personnel during a meeting when they expressed concerns about their safety given the deteriorating security environment.

Embassy personnel also told OIG during the review that the lack of clarity caused confusion and made some personnel less prepared for an evacuation. Appointing two ambassadors to oversee the evacuation, caused more confusion, the report adds.

Published in Dawn, September 29th, 2023