House Republicans Demand Answers from Biden Officials on Botched Afghanistan Withdrawal
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Top Republicans on the House Oversight Committee sent letters on Friday to several Biden administration officials demanding answers about the United States’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“The Biden administration was tragically unprepared for the Afghanistan withdrawal and their decisions in the region directly resulted in a national security and humanitarian catastrophe,” Representative James Comer (R., Ky.), the committee’s chairman, said in a prepared statement.
“The American people deserve answers and the Biden administration’s ongoing obstruction of this investigation is unacceptable,” he added.
Comer and the chairs of several subcommittees sent letters requesting records, documents and communications about the withdrawal to Biden administration officials, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Samantha Power.
Republicans on the committee have requested answers about the withdrawal more than ten times, according to a press release, but the Biden administration has failed to produce any of the requested information. Additionally, Comer and Republicans on the committee have asked their Democratic colleagues to hold hearings on the matter three times between August 2021 and January 2022, though no hearing was ever held, the press release noted.
Thirteen U.S. service members died in a suicide bombing during the exit, and as many as 9,000 Americans were left in Afghanistan as the U.S. completed its withdrawal in August 2021, according to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report released last February.
The world watched as Kabul fell and masses of people scrambled to leave, with Taliban fighters whipping and beating Afghans trying to enter the airport where the U.S. military was handling evacuations. U.S. intelligence agencies warned that the Afghan military and government were in danger of collapse just one month earlier, as Biden publicly assured Americans that the Taliban’s takeover was “not inevitable.”
When the House Armed Services Committee held a hearing on the withdrawal in September 2021, Milley acknowledged in his testimony that the U.S. was caught off-guard by the swift fall of the U.S.-backed Afghan government.
“We absolutely missed the rapid, 11-day collapse of the Afghan military and the Afghan government,” he said.
Comer and other House Republicans wrote in a letter to Blinken: “You were at the center of planning the withdrawal and evacuation and you advised President Biden on decisions that amounted to tactical and strategic failures. Further, you contrived a narrative of success and orderliness as the Taliban retook Afghanistan as Afghans clung to and fell from planes departing Hamid Karzai International Airport and a suicide bomber murdered 13 U.S. service members and hundreds of innocent Afghans.”
The letter requests records, documents and communications from January 20, 2021 to present referring or relating to contingency plans for the Afghanistan withdrawal and evacuation, as well as records, documents and communications with the former Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan regarding the planning and evacuation of U.S. troops, diplomats, and contractors, among other details.
In a separate letter to Austin and Milley, the group similarly requests all records, documents, and communications from January 20, 2021, to present related to contingency plans in the Afghanistan withdrawal and evacuation, but also asks the pair to “include any rationale or discussion regarding the decision to remove air support prior to the evacuation of U.S. citizens.”
The letter goes on to request records, documents and communications discussing or requesting a surge or drawing down of troops in Afghanistan or in support of the mission in Afghanistan from January 20 to September 30, 2021.
