Devastating new details reveal more State Department chaos in the two weeks ... trends now
Hours of private testimony by two of the top State Department officials who oversaw the evacuation from Afghanistan lays bare the confusion at the heart of the operation, and how they failed to respond to warning signs that the Taliban was sweeping across the country.
The result was a chaotic operation at Kabul's airport in August 2021 with Americans scrambling to get on flights after the extremist group had seized control of the country.
American citizens had to pass through checkpoints run by the same gunmen who had spent years battling U.S. forces.
Yet even as the Pentagon prepositioned forces to support an evacuation as ground conditions worsened, the officials, Brian McKeon and Derek Chollet, said their priority had been to work out how to keep the U.S. embassy open.
They were still working on a plan to evacuate Americans and their Afghan allies when the militant group overran the capital.
Taliban gunmen swept into Kabul on August 15, 2021. The speed of their advance, as Afghan National Security Forces collapsed, took U.S. officials by surprise
Two top State Department officials, Derek Chollet (left) and Brian McKeon were interviewed by the House Foreign Affairs Committee investigation last year. Their testimony, obtained by DailyMail.com, offers fresh insight into how officials failed to anticipate the Taliban advance
Transcripts of their closed door interviews with the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC), obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com, are among more than a dozen interviews conducted as part of its investigation into the evacuation and the deaths of 13 U.S. service members.
The investigation's findings are due to be published in August, according to an HFAC majority aide. And the report will serve to remind voters of President Joe Biden's handling of the withdrawal three months before the election.
Hundreds of Americans were left behind and thousands of Afghan allies, who worked for the U.S., could not get on to evacuation flights.
Amid the chaos, 13 American service personnel and more than 160 Afghans died when a suicide bomber attacked the airport 11 days after the evacuation began.
The transcripts paint a picture of State Department officials who were oblivious to the latest conditions on the ground and the Taliban's rapid advance.
And McKeon, Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources, until he stepped down in December 2022, admitted that officials were never able to confirm how many Americans were on the ground and would need help.
He was asked whether a plan to evacuate Americans was ever finalized. It was a work in progress, he said on November 29 last year.
'Well, we were working on a [noncombatant evacuation operation] plan, which would have included evacuating Americans, yes,' he said.
The same went for U.S. residents and for Afghans who had worked for American forces or agencies.
Overall, the testimony paints a picture of officials who did not anticipate the fall of Kabul until it was too late and did not always have the latest information.
In total, over 122,000 people were airlifted out of Hamid Karzai International Airport in an operation that ended on August 30, when the last U.S. troops left
But the airport was plunged into chaos during that time as desperate Afghans tried to flee
Foreign nationals and Afghans had to navigate Taliban checkpoints around the city, like this one (previously manned by American troops) close to the abandoned U.S. embassy
McKeon, for example, admitted having little interaction with Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan tasked with negotiating with the Taliban and understanding its thinking.
And Chollet, who styles himself as fixer to Secretary of State Antony Blinken ('it's a little bit of the Wolf from Pulp Fiction,' he once told a podcast) said he was unaware of attacks launched by the Taliban on U.S. forces that may have changed the calculus in Washington.
At times the two discussed some of the most important issues not via formal meetings or briefing documents but by way of their shared bathroom.
That included whether the Taliban was abiding by the Doha Agreement to ensure that Afghan soil could not be used by terrorists.
'So, when I went out the back door of my office into the bathroom, if his door was open and he was sitting there, I would often go in there and we would shoot the breeze on stuff, sometimes about nothing or gossip or sports and sometimes about work,' said McKeon. 'So it may have come up in those conversations.'
Biden ordered the withdrawal of all remaining U.S. troops on April 14, 2021.
In setting a deadline of September 11—a symbolic target that was quietly shelved—the president was following a deal struck between the Taliban and the Trump administration to bring home American troops so long as Afghanistan was not used by terrorist groups.
In his testimony, McKeon said he had overall responsibility for planning the withdrawal and possible evacuation.
Yet he did not receive his first briefing on Afghanistan until April, even through the withdrawal was a key plank of Biden's
