JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Three years ago this week, the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan. It was a dangerous and chaotic exit. Thirteen troops and many, many Afghan civilians died. Former President Trump has laid the blame squarely on President Joe Biden and presidential candidate Kamala Harris. We wanted to talk more about some of those charges. Here to help us out are NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman and NPR's Quil Lawrence, our former Kabul bureau chief. Welcome to both of you.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Hey, Juana.
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: Hello.
SUMMERS: So let's just start by hearing what Trump has been saying lately about the withdrawal. Here he is speaking yesterday in Detroit.
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DONALD TRUMP: Kamala Harris, Joe Biden - the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world.
SUMMERS: Some harsh charges there - but Tom, if you can, take us back to when the conversation first started about pulling all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan.
BOWMAN: Well, Juana, it's important to note that it was the Trump administration that signed this peace deal that was basically a quick exit plan. It called for all U.S. troops to be out by May 2021. Then, after the election, Trump reduced the American troops from 5,000 to 2,500, even though the Taliban did not live up to the agreement, including talking to the Afghan government. And one of his aides then went to the Pentagon and said all troops out by January 15, just five days before Biden was to be inaugurated. Pentagon officials balked and said it can't possibly be done that quickly.
LAWRENCE: And just to fact-check one thing former President Trump repeated yesterday - that, during his presidency, there were no casualties in Afghanistan for 18 months. Trump's been saying this for years, and it's just not true, according to Pentagon records.
SUMMERS: Quil, I want to stay with you for a second. You and Tom both spent years covering Afghanistan. So help us understand - how fair is it to lay the blame squarely with the Biden-Harris administration here?
LAWRENCE: There is a lot of failure to go around to the four presidents over the 20 years of war. Trump was clearly interested in ending American entanglements overseas, and Biden wanted out of Afghanistan, too, since as far back as 2009, as Obama's VP. I can say I watched on the ground. From about 2005, the Taliban started gaining territory, and they did so for the next 15 years. At the end, when Kabul fell, it was on Biden's watch. All the intel reports at the time suggested that the city would stand for a few more months. Friends of mine in Kabul told me they expected that, and they didn't flee. In hindsight, it was a massive intelligence failure.
BOWMAN: You know, that's what I heard from senior military officials. They thought the Afghan government could last maybe into October, but everything collapsed very quickly. And Quil's right. There were a lot of mistakes made during four administrations. The U.S. tried to do really too much - turn Afghanistan into a Western-style government and military, flooding the country with tens of billions of dollars that fueled corruption. There were also these Taliban safe havens in Pakistan that the U.S. could never eliminate.
SUMMERS: I want to go back, if we can, to something that Quil mentioned earlier - the fall of Kabul three years ago. The Taliban took over at the capital as the evacuations were underway. Now, was that bound to happen because of how the U.S. left things?
BOWMAN: Yeah, I think so. I think whenever the evacuation happened, it was going to be difficult. It's a landlocked country and you have too few U.S. troops and thousands of desperate, maybe tens of thousands of desperate Afghans trying to get out. Now, the U.S. military wanted everyone out by July 4th. U.S. troops, NATO forces, the embassy, Afghan allies, but the Biden administration allowed the embassy to remain open well into August. That was clearly a mistake because, by then, Juana, the Taliban were in the city, and then it's really a mess. You don't know who's a friend or a foe.
LAWRENCE: And that's the scene outside the airport. And a suicide bomber shows up to that mob of civilians and kills more than a hundred desperate Afghans trying to escape the Taliban and 13 of the troops that had been trying to save them. I'll just mention one of their names - Marine Sergeant Nicole Gee. She volunteered at the gate to help search women and children who were coming in. Days before she was killed, she posted a picture of herself on Instagram holding an Afghan baby, with the comment, I love my job.
SUMMERS: So given what we do know now, have there been any lessons learned here?
LAWRENCE: Politically, well, I mean, the Harris campaign seems to avoid talking about the war, and the Trump campaign seems intent on talking about only the last month of the war. Veterans I talk to and other Americans are still spending a lot of their time and money trying to help get their Afghan friends out.
SUMMERS: That's NPR's Tom Bowman and Quil Lawrence. Thanks to both of you.
BOWMAN: You're welcome.
LAWRENCE: Thanks. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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