WASHINGTON – The White House Thursday released its first after-action review of the disastrous 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan – without taking responsibility for its role in the rushed evacuation mission blighted by the deaths of 13 US service members and hundreds of Afghans in an ISIS suicide bombing.

As National Security Council spokesman John Kirby took questions from reporters about the 12-page document — released moments before he met the media — President Biden himself slipped out the front door of the White House to a waiting helicopter, departing Washington to spend the Easter holiday weekend at Camp David. 

The review blames former President Donald Trump’s administration for pledging to the Taliban that the US would leave Afghanistan by May 2021 as part of the Doha agreement — a move that supposedly left his successor no option but to pull American forces out. In fact, the deal also gave the US the right to withdraw from the accord if Afghan peace talks failed — which they did.

“During the transition from the Trump Administration to the Biden administration, the outgoing administration provided no plans for how to conduct the final withdrawal or to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies,” the document states. “There were no such plans in place when President Biden came into office, even with the agreed-upon full withdrawal just over three months away.”

In a sign of the administration’s priorities, the name “Trump” is mentioned 14 times while “accountable” appears just once – and even then isn’t in reference to the US taking responsibility for anything.

“We have rallied our allies and partners to support Ukraine and hold Russia accountable for its aggression – and to rise to compete with China,” the document states. “It is hard to imagine the United States would have been able to lead the response to these challenges as successfully – especially in the resource-intensive way that it has – if U.S. forces remained in Afghanistan today.”

Meanwhile, Kirby insisted to reporters that Biden was intent on ending the 20-year US war in Afghanistan even before taking office, while also blaming Trump for promising the Taliban that the withdrawal would take place.

Kirby also downplayed images seen worldwide of desperate Afghans attempting to hold on to the outside of departing planes before falling to their deaths.

“For all this talk of chaos, I just didn’t see it, not from my perch,” said Kirby, who was the Pentagon’s lead press secretary at the time. “At one point during the evacuation, there was an aircraft taking off full of people, Americans and Afghans alike, every 48 minutes and not one single mission was missed. So I’m sorry, I just won’t buy the whole argument of chaos. It was tough in the first few hours, you would expect it to be.”

The reporters who quizzed Kirby in the briefing room were denied the opportunity to question Biden as he left the nation’s capital. White House staff generally deconflict such events so they don’t overlap and divide the press corps’ attention.

Biden’s motorcade left the White House more than two hours ahead of schedule, with no formal word of the change being given to the media. 

In a twist, the president also did not board his Marine One helicopter on the South Lawn, which would have forced him to walk past waiting pool reporters. Instead, he took a motorcade from the front door of the White House to nearby Fort McNair.

A White House spokesperson told The Post that Biden chose not to use the South Lawn because of preparations for the White House Easter Egg Roll on Monday.

The president plucked a flower from the ground — possibly a dandelion, according to a pool report — and presented it to first lady Jill Biden, but he didn’t take questions from the small daily press pool that witnessed the helicopter boarding at the military installation in Southwest DC.

As Biden flew away, CBS News Radio reporter Steven Portnoy asked Kirby when the commander-in-chief would take questions about the findings. Kirby deflected that he wasn’t aware of current plans and sidestepped questions about whether Biden had any regrets for his decisions and actions leading up to the withdrawal.

Though the NSC document admitted that “as late as May 2021, the assessment was still that Kabul would probably not come under serious pressure until late 2021 after US troops departed,” it failed to label the fall of Afghanistan as an intelligence failure.

“There’s not a single [operation] that ever goes perfectly according to plan,” Kirby said. “Things happen. Sometimes the enemy gets a vote.”

Instead, the false intelligence was used as an excuse in the report for the Biden administration’s ill-preparedness to conduct evacuations with the Taliban in control of Kabul.

“Faced with these circumstances, President Biden undertook a deliberate, intensive, rigorous, and inclusive decision-making process,” the self-congratulatory document said. “… The departing Trump Administration had left the Biden Administration with a date for withdrawal, but no plan for executing it.”

Pressed on the amount of finger-pointing in the report, Kirby said the document’s purpose was to “provide our perspectives” of what happened and lessons learned.

“This effort – this document – isn’t about accountability today,” he said. “It’s about understanding.”

Trump himself responded to the report with a blistering screed on Truth Social, saying: “These Morons in the White House, who are systematically destroying our Country, headed up by the biggest Moron of them all, Hopeless Joe Biden, have a new disinformation game they are playing – Blame ‘TRUMP’ for their grossly incompetent SURRENDER in Afghanistan. I watched this disaster unfold just like everyone else. I saw them take out the Military FIRST, GIVE $85 Billion of military equipment, allow killing of our soldiers, and leave Americans behind. Biden is responsible, no one else!”

Rep. Michael McCaul, (R-Texas), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, slammed Kirby’s comments as “disgraceful and insulting.”

“President Biden made the decision to withdraw and even picked the exact date; he is responsible for the massive failures in planning and execution,” McCaul said. “It is also unfortunate it took my subpoena threat to prompt the administration to finally provide the classified after-action reports from the Afghanistan withdrawal.

“I look forward to reviewing the report and call upon the administration to declassify as much as possible for the American public. Finally, Congress must be given access to the full and complete record of documents from the withdrawal in order to get the answers on why the withdrawal was such a disaster.”