In a statement, Rep. Michael T. McCaul (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, suggested that the materials transmitted to Congress were incomplete, and he implored the administration to declassify “as much as possible” as lawmakers investigate “why the withdrawal was such a disaster.”

GOP leaders have portrayed the U.S. departure from Afghanistan as a deadly fiasco for which President Biden and his top advisers have ducked accountability. An estimated 170 Afghans were killed alongside 13 American troops in a suicide attack outside Kabul’s airport. Days later, Air Force drone operators killed 10 civilians, including seven children, believing incorrectly that they were targeting another would-be bomber.

The White House has maintained that Biden had few options after his predecessor, President Donald Trump, signed a deal with the Taliban in 2020 that required U.S. forces to leave the country. With its summary, the White House again sought to fault Trump for the chaos, even as it acknowledged that the Biden administration has handled later crises — in Ukraine and Ethiopia — far differently after what transpired in Kabul.

“We now prioritize earlier evacuations when faced with a degrading security situation,” the summary said, noting that the administration withdrew some personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Ethiopia in November 2021 “despite the vigorous objections of the Ethiopian government,” and last year evacuated personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv nearly two weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

But the White House summary glosses over other key details about the evacuation from Afghanistan that cast the Biden administration in a negative light, including that Biden had ordered the withdrawal of all U.S. troops despite recommendations from defense officials who wanted the commander in chief to keep a force of about 2,500 in Afghanistan to help prevent the U.S.-backed government from collapsing.

The document makes no mention either that senior U.S. military officials who participated in the evacuation expressed frustration with the administration when interviewed as part of an earlier Defense Department investigation. In documents first reported on by The Washington Post last year, the senior commander during the mission, Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, told military investigators that the United States would have been “much better prepared to conduct a more orderly” evacuation “if policymakers had paid attention to the indicators of what was happening on the ground.”

A senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the matter remains so politically volatile, said that, for days before Taliban fighters swept into the capital on gun trucks, senior Pentagon officials recommended against launching the evacuation. The operation began Aug. 14, after Biden’s senior national security advisers changed their recommendation, the official said. The Taliban seized control of Kabul the following day, after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country.

Biden, who pledged to end the war while campaigning for president, later altered the deadline to say that U.S. forces would be out by Sept. 11, 2021, the 20th anniversary of terrorist attacks on the United States that precipitated the invasion.

The evacuation pulled from harm’s way more than 120,000 people — Americans and Afghans who aided the war effort — in less than three weeks, but it was an operation that appeared on the brink of spiraling out of control for days before catastrophe struck.

With few good options to ensure security outside the airport where thousands had massed, desperate to catch a departing flight, U.S. military officials reached an uneasy agreement with the Taliban. Militant fighters were posted outside to maintain order while coalition troops processed those seeking entry. Service members involved in the mission have since said that they witnessed Taliban foot soldiers routinely beating civilians attempting to reach the airport and executing some of them.

John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, told reporters at the White House that it is “undeniable” that Trump officials’ decisions and lack of planning “significantly limited” the options that were available to Biden.

When Biden took office, Kirby said, he inherited a force of about 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, the fewest that had been there since 2001. The Special Immigrant Visa program run by the State Department to consider which Afghans deserved refuge in the United States for assisting the U.S. war effort also had been “starved for resources,” Kirby said, creating an uphill climb for the administration to move quickly to assist Afghan allies in harm’s way.

“Do not underestimate the effect that Doha agreement had on the morale and the willingness to fight of the Afghan defense forces,” Kirby said.

Despite civilian deaths and U.S. troops describing problems with food shortages, sanitation and people sneaking into the airport without screening, Kirby sought to make the case Thursday that the evacuation went well. “I’m sorry, I just don’t buy the whole argument of chaos,” Kirby said. “It was tough in the first few hours. You would expect it to be; there was nobody at the airport and certainly no Americans. It took time to get in there.”

Sen. Roger Wicker (R.-Miss.), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, also condemned the White House’s framing of the Afghanistan withdrawal. “Instead of addressing honestly and openly the substantial flaws in its decision-making process, the Biden administration has provided the public a full-throated and deeply partisan explanation of its indefensible Afghanistan policy,” he said.

Asked whether anyone in the U.S. intelligence community would be held responsible for failures in Afghanistan, Kirby said: “It’s really hard. I’ve yet to see an intelligence assessment that ever was 110 percent certain about something. They get paid to do the best they can.” He acknowledged, however, that “clearly, we didn’t get things right,” including “how fast the Taliban were moving across the country” during the first two weeks of August 2021, secret capitulation deals that had been made with Afghan security force commanders, and “how fast they were going to fold.”

The inspector general also determined that the “stage had been set” for collapse long before, by multiple U.S. administrations and the Afghan government, which failed to build units that were self-sustainable.

Meryl Kornfield contributed to this report.

The U.N. said the ban, which it believes will be actively enforced, is likely to affect the organization’s ability to mitigate the country’s dire humanitarian situation. About two-thirds of Afghans are estimated to rely on lifesaving assistance.

Bilal Karimi, a deputy Taliban spokesman, had no immediate comment, saying he was still gathering information on the issue on Wednesday evening.

“The enforcement of this [ban] will harm the Afghan people, millions of whom are in need of this assistance,” Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesman for the U.N. secretary general, said in a statement.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., told reporters that the Taliban rulers’ “attempt to erase women” is “appalling; it’s unacceptable.”

The U.N. had already raised concerns Tuesday over a looming ban on its female staff in the country, saying in a tweet that “female national UN staff have been prevented from reporting to work in Nangarhar province,” and later adding that officials were under the impression that the ban applied nationwide.

But Hanif Nangarhari, a local director of information and culture, said Tuesday that “this issue is not new.”

The U.N. held talks with Taliban representatives Wednesday to gain clarity on the ban.

According to the U.N., the new ban on female Afghan workers is an extension of a directive first announced in December that barred female Afghan employees from working at international organizations. That ban prompted several major international aid groups to halt operations in Afghanistan, saying they couldn’t effectively reach people in need without female staffers, but U.N. agencies initially appeared to be largely unaffected.

Taliban representatives earlier said the December decision was made after “serious complaints” that women working for nongovernmental organizations were not observing conservative Islamic dress. Earlier last year, the Taliban had ordered all Afghan women to wear head-to-toe coverings in public.

Susannah George and Karen DeYoung contributed to this report.