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This month, the Taliban are marking two years since they retook control of Kabul, a swift blow that shocked the international community and set in motion a frantic evacuation led by the United States.
The violent and chaotic final phase of the U.S. withdrawal in August 2021 saw more than 122,000 people airlifted to safety, but at least 180 people, including 13 U.S. military service members, were killed when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives near Hamid Karzai International Airport's Abbey Gate entrance on August 26.
Critics of the evacuation — known officially as a Noncombatant Evacuation Operation or NEO — say there is plenty of blame to go around.
"It was a Kafkaesque exercise in bureaucracy and red tape with no clear lines of authority while lives were on the line," said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, at a Senate hearing about a month after the evacuation ended.
"We were unprepared," he said.
U.S. officials who spoke to VOA at the time of the fall, and again in recent weeks, have placed the blame largely on the State Department. They say the U.S. Embassy in Kabul repeatedly ignored Taliban gains that were meant to be seen as "trip wires" to signal the need for a NEO.
On May 1, 2021, the Taliban controlled roughly 75 Afghan districts, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies' By July 12, the Taliban controlled more than 210 of Afghanistan's roughly 400 districts.
But as Afghan territories fell like dominoes, efforts by the military to conduct an interagency tabletop exercise to prepare for the evacuation were delayed. The State Department continued to "move the date because Secretary of State Antony Blinken was on vacation," according to one official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to talk to reporters.
Two officials told VOA that the State Department initially did not want the evacuation to include Afghan nationals who had worked with U.S. forces and had applied for Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) to the United States. Instead, State wanted the military to focus solely on airlifting U.S. citizens and embassy personnel.
VOA asked the State Department how many Afghans seeking SIVs the U.S. wanted to include in its initial evacuation plans, but the department declined to comment.
According to an after-action report by U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, during the interagency tabletop evacuation exercise on August 10, Afghanistan's crumbling situation was presented to Biden administration officials with a prediction that Kabul could be fully isolated within 30 days. However, diplomats did not order an evacuation that day.
"There was a reluctance [from State] to plan for the worst, and a reluctance to start the needed evacuation," a U.S. official close to the evacuation planning told VOA.
The State Department finally ordered the military to conduct an NEO on August 14, one day before Kabul fell.
"There was not a sufficient sense of urgency," wrote authors of an released by the State Department this year.
By definition, NEOs are "conducted by the Department of Defense … when directed by the Department of State," and officials have said friction between the two led to the haphazard evacuation.
NEOs are overseen by the chief of mission, who was U.S. Ambassador Ross Wilson.
One official told VOA that in addition to "waiting too long" to order the NEO, Wilson appeared to have "no policy [for] prioritizing how to get folks out." Sometimes SIV applicants would get processed by State, other times not. Multiple C-17s left Kabul airport without any evacuees on the first day of the evacuation, said another official.
The State Department flew in a second ambassador and others to help with the NEO after Kabul fell, but processing remained the slowest part of the evacuation, frustrating military leaders, including Rear Admiral Peter Vasely and Brigadier General Farrell Sullivan, the officers responsible for coordinating the evacuation.
According to one official, Vasely was instructing military personnel to "load and go" in an effort to get as many people as possible onto planes so they could be fully processed in a safer location outside Afghanistan. State Department personnel, on the other hand, wanted to fully process potential evacuees before they boarded a plane.
International television audiences were shocked by scenes of desperate Afghans clinging to the undercarriages of planes as they took off, only to fall to their deaths.