The botched withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan will go down in history as one of the worst failures of the Biden Administration. Future generations of military leaders will learn about it as a case study in what not to do. Thirteen members of the U.S. Armed Forces were killed in the withdrawal, along with some 170 friendly Afghans. Additionally, billions of dollars in American military assets were left behind for the Taliban to take control of, thereby solidifying the vice grip of their despotic regime.
One would think that an extensive review of this disaster would make major headlines. This is the kind of policy blunder Americans should be talking about. Yet, the Biden Administration employed every trick they knew from the Swamp playbook to bury the extensive State Department report.
First and most critically, they released the report on the Friday preceding the extended Independence Day weekend. Keep in mind, the report was completed last March. This delay put as much distance between the withdrawal and the report as possible. Stacking it up against a holiday weekend made it so that most people would only read about the report nearly a week after the release, because few people watch the news over a four-day holiday weekend.
Second, much of the report was withheld so that the public could not see the extent of the disaster. U.S. Representative and Green Beret Army National Guard Colonel Mike Waltz said, “Like other Afghanistan-related documents, much of this report remains unnecessarily classified to avoid future embarrassment, transparency, and accountability.” As Waltz pointed out, only 24 of the full 87 pages were released, even though much of the missing content was only labeled “Sensitive” or “Unclassified.”
The release of a vital report on Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is steeped in Swamp tactics. They released the report right before the holiday weekend and withheld a bunch of the report that wasn’t even classified. All this helps them frame the narrative. We need to recognize their tactics and ensure that we are rebuffing their attempts to control what we talk about.
