It is an iron law that if governments put out important documents just ahead of a long holiday weekend there is something fishy about them. So it was with President Biden’s decision to release a report on America’s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan on Thursday, before the Easter weekend. The White House press corps had about ten minutes to read it before a briefing where the first questioner, channelling Gilbert and Sullivan’s modern major-general, described it as the ‘very definition of a modern major holiday news dump.’
Biden may be the only person in the world who does not see the withdrawal from Afghanistan as being a critical failure of his administration
The report is a thin 12-page self-justification for the decisions made before and during the catastrophic withdrawal, selectively drawing on material gathered from after-action reviews across government. At the same time the State Department and the Pentagon sent their own reviews to relevant committees in Congress.
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