The United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Minority Report came out in February 2022. I did not have the time to read the whole 65 pages long report.
From the Executive Summary:
"On August 31, 2021, the United States concluded its military engagement in Afghanistan. The failure of senior Biden Administration leadership to plan for this fateful day resulted in a rushed evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Americans, third-country nationals, and Afghans. It left behind hundreds, possibly thousands, of American citizens, tens of thousands of Afghan partners, and a legacy of American betrayal of allies. ...
The Biden Administration failed to properly plan for an evacuation despite countless
warning signs that a Taliban takeover was imminent. The U.S. government failed to even account for the number of people who would need to be evacuated, let alone for how this evacuation would occur. ...
In conducting interviews for this report, it is clear that despite substantial failures of leadership and foresight, it was junior and mid-level civil servants, Foreign Service and military officers, and enlisted personnel who would help mitigate a number of issues through extraordinary feats. In fact, it was the heroic initiative taken by these people that prevented the evacuation from being even more disastrous than it could have been. Our diplomats on the ground and in Washington outdid themselves, working around the clock while the enemy circled, with few, if any, resources outside of the Hamid Karzai International Airport. ..."
Some other excerpts:
"State should have stepped up its accounting of U.S. citizens and improved the process for Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) applicants and others who assisted the United States. In May, there were 17,000 principle SIV-eligible applicants in Afghanistan who were in the pipeline, and when dependents were included,
the number would be substantially higher. Beyond those who had applied, neither State nor the Department of Defense (DoD) could even estimate how many Afghans were eligible for the program. As we now know from additional
applicants, this number is in the tens of thousands. With the Taliban hunting down
those who had assisted the United States, State should have planned to relocate a sizable amount of these people ...
but State did not officially reach out to regional partners until the middle of July, and DoD did not engage the Qatari government about using facilities there until the middle of August. Offers from the Pakistani government to host evacuees were rebuffed. To its immense credit, the Qatari government was quick to help, and roughly 57,000 people moved through Qatar during the NEO [noncombatant evacuation operation]. As one Foreign Service officer noted, it was Qatar’s support “that encouraged other Gulf partners to provide assistance.” ...
State often relies on host governments to provide greater accuracy regarding the number of Americans on the ground. ... The Afghan government, on the other
hand, did not have this information. ...
On August 17, 2021, and at the height of evacuation efforts, senior State Department officials leading the evacuation task force indicated there were 10,000 to 15,000 [non-combatant] Americans [citizens] in Afghanistan, according to the F-77 report.12 By August 31, when the president ordered an end to evacuation operations, State and DoD had evacuated approximately 6,000 American citizens. Even taking the most conservative estimates from the F-77 report, this meant the United States left at least a few thousand [non-combatant] American Citizens behind. However, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in September, asserted that
only a “small number” of American citizens, “approximately 100-150 remained in
Afghanistan who still wished to depart. ..."
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