Taliban soldiers stand in front of a sign at the international airport in Kabul
Credit: Reuters File Photo
Washington: House Republicans are preparing to release an investigative report blaming the Biden administration for what they called the failures of the chaotic and deadly US withdrawal from Afghanistan, laying out a scathing indictment that appeared timed to tarnish Vice President Kamala Harris in the final weeks before the presidential election.
The roughly 350-page document set to be released Monday is the product of a yearslong inquiry by Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It accuses President Joe Biden and his national security team of being so determined to pull out of Afghanistan that they flouted security warnings, refused to plan for an evacuation and lied to the American public throughout the withdrawal about the risks on the ground and missteps that led to the deaths of 13 US service members.
“The Biden-Harris administration prioritized the optics of the withdrawal over the security of US personnel on the ground,” the report states. The document, a draft of which was reviewed by The New York Times, also contends that the administration’s mismanagement resulted in “exposing US Defense Department and State Department personnel to lethal threats and emotional harm.”
Details of the document were reported earlier Sunday by CBS.
The findings are largely a recitation of familiar lines of criticism against Biden, offering few new insights about what might have been done differently to avoid the Taliban’s swift march into Kabul and the disastrous US evacuation operation in August 2021. But they come at a critical time in the presidential race, when former President Donald Trump has been working to persuade voters that Harris is unfit to be commander in chief.
The authors single out Jake Sullivan, national security adviser, for particular condemnation, charging that he failed to coordinate a viable exit strategy and misrepresented to the public the situation on the ground.
They absolve Trump almost entirely of responsibility for the debacle, even though an inspector general found in 2022 that the deal his administration struck with the Taliban in 2020, known as the Doha Agreement, to orchestrate a rapid US withdrawal, was a major factor in the crisis. The report instead faults Zalmay Khalilzad, then the US special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation, for the shortcomings of that pact.
A number of independent and internal government reviews have found that a series of factors — including that agreement, the Afghan military’s dependence on support from US troops and contractors, and insufficient worst-case-scenario planning — contributed to the harried nature of the withdrawal.
Trump has gone to great lengths to try to portray Harris as responsible for the deaths of 13 service members in a terrorist attack near the Kabul airport in the final days of the evacuation. Harris, in turn, has accused Trump of trying to score political points off the deaths of those and other troops, after his campaign took photos and video of him in a restricted area of Arlington National Ceremony in defiance of military rules.
The report offers little new information about what role Harris played in the president’s actions on Afghanistan, though it repeatedly castigates the “Biden-Harris administration” and quotes the vice president’s assertion that she was “the last person in the room” when Biden made the decision to withdraw US troops.
“Vice President Harris, despite publicly championing Afghan women’s rights, appears to have been working in lock step with President Biden behind the scenes to withdraw all US troops no matter the consequence to Afghan women and girls,” the report says.
Democrats complained that the report ignored Trump’s role.
“The Republican majority has taken particular pains to avoid facts involving former President Trump,” Rep. Gregory W. Meeks of New York, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote in a letter accompanying a memorandum countering the GOP’s findings. “Republicans’ partisan attempts to garner headlines rather than acknowledge the full facts and substance of their investigation have only increased with the heat of an election season.”
In their memorandum, Democrats insisted that Biden administration officials pulled off as seamless an evacuation as could have been mustered in a rapidly deteriorating threat environment.
But the Republicans’ report condemns the State Department for failing to put a reliable consular process in place to ensure Americans and the Afghans who supported US operations would be able to reach the international airport in Kabul and board planes out of Afghanistan.
It metes out scathing criticism for a wide swath of senior State Department and National Security Council officials for failing to draft contingency plans that might have helped mitigate the confusion or scale back the US diplomatic footprint in proportion with the reduction in troops.
And it asserts that many witnesses pointed to Sullivan as “taking the lead for the Biden-Harris administration’s withdrawal planning and strategy — and owning many of the failures.”
The White House pushed back against the findings, calling the charges against Sullivan “false and complete nonsense.”
“Everything we have seen and heard of Chairman McCaul’s latest partisan report shows that it is based on cherry-picked facts, inaccurate characterizations and pre-existing biases that have plagued this investigation from the start,” Sharon Yang, a spokesperson, said in a statement, referring to the committee’s chair, Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas.
“The White House coordinated a robust policy-planning process ahead of and during the withdrawal that reflected input from departments and agencies across the government, including officials on the ground in Kabul,” she added.
The report also charges that internal State Department risk assessments were watered down and embassy staff members who dared raise safety concerns were reprimanded. Ambassador Ross Wilson, then the top diplomat in Kabul, is described as so “maniacal” about keeping the embassy open that staff members wanting to discuss contingency plans for an evacuation had to meet in secret.
Republicans allege that when Wilson ultimately fled the embassy, he left some staff behind — and later, after learning he had contracted COVID-19 during the evacuation, had a Foreign Service officer take a test in his stead to procure a negative result, so he could escape quarantine in Qatar and go home.
In an interview, Wilson categorically denied those claims and said that he “never reprimanded anybody.” He also said that while he was not the last person to leave the embassy, the only staff members who remained stayed behind to destroy sensitive and classified information, and that they arrived at the Kabul airport the next morning.
In interviews with the committee, Wilson and others also said that evacuation planning was underway in the spring of 2021.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is presented as mostly absent during the crisis, delegating decision-making during critical weeks to subordinates. Spokespeople for the department rebutted that characterization.
In a statement, Matthew Miller, a spokesperson for the State Department, accused Republicans of having “done a disservice by relying on false information and presenting inaccurate narratives meant only to harm the administration.”
The report is largely sympathetic to the military. But it challenges the Defense Department’s conclusion that the attack at Abbey Gate that killed 11 Marines, one soldier and one sailor was the work of a sole bomber from the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate, citing testimony from Marines who referred to gunshots and bullet wounds.
Military officials have explained that ball bearings in the explosive device used in the attack would have caused wounds that appeared similar to gunshot wounds.