House Republicans and Democrats issue dueling documents casting blame for mistakes made in US withdrawal from Afghanistan
By Jennifer Hansler and Kylie Atwood, CNN
(CNN) — Republicans and Democrats released dueling documents on the deadly August 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan on Monday, with Republicans accusing President Joe Biden of demanding a US exit no matter the cost and claiming his administration prioritized optics over personnel security.
The reports come as former President Donald Trump’s campaign seeks to make the decisions surrounding the exit a key issue in the final weeks before the presidential election.
Republicans in their report highlight public comments from Biden administration officials that did not reflect the reality on the ground, while Democrats claimed in their memorandum that the GOP is manipulating the facts.
The release — after years of investigation by the Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee — of the report by GOP Chairman Rep Michael McCaul and a minority memorandum by Democratic Ranking Member Rep. Gregory Meeks underscore how partisan the debate over the frenzied US exit from Afghanistan has become. The reports also thrust the evacuation back into the spotlight during the lead-up to the election as the GOP has used the evacuation to attack Vice President Kamala Harris.
The Republican report cites Harris as having worked “in lockstep with President Biden behind the scenes to withdraw all US troops.”
The documents are the latest in a series of examinations of the withdrawal, which saw the deaths of 13 US service members and left behind thousands of Afghans who had worked with the United States.
Accusations of culpability have fallen largely along party lines, with Republicans pointing fingers at the Biden administration for hastily pulling the US out of the country and Democrats, including the White House, casting blame on the Trump administration for striking a deal with the Taliban that set the US withdrawal into motion.
The conclusions of both documents, obtained by CNN ahead of their release Monday, continue that pattern. Although there were some new details revealed, the overarching findings largely align with what was already known.
The Republican report is highly critical of the Biden administration and pins the blame for the chaotic exit exclusively on its decisions. It also aims to implicate Harris, now the Democratic nominee for president, in its accusations by referring to the current government as “the Biden-Harris administration.”
“The Biden-Harris administration misled and, in some instances, directly lied to the American people at every stage of the withdrawal, from before the go-to-zero order until today,” the more than 350-page long Republican report alleges.
It lays out 23 recommendations, including the passage of resolutions condemning President Joe Biden, Harris, and other key members of the national security team.
The recommendations also focus on making future non-combatant evacuation operations (NEO) successful, calling for Congress to put into place standard operating procedures for such a drawdown and requirements for the State Department and DOD to brief congress on NEO plans when an embassy has been designated as a high threat post.
The long list also calls for the declassification of information related to the deadly Abbey Gate terrorist attack that killed 13 service members and dozens of Afghans and the establishment of eyewitness portals for after-action reviews.
“Anyone who reads this report will be able to see that we conducted this investigation with integrity, not drawing conclusion ahead of time but rather looking at the facts and evidence we collected. The report is simply a recitation of those facts and evidence,” McCaul said in response to accusations from his Democratic colleagues and the administration that the report was politicized.
“This is not about politics to me — it never has been. It’s about getting to the bottom of what happened so we can make sure it never happens again,” he said in a statement. “And it’s about finding who was responsible for this catastrophe so they can finally, after three long years, be held accountable.”
Meeks, the Democratic ranking member on the committee, accused McCaul of pursuing a “predetermined, partisan narrative about the Afghanistan withdrawal” and asserted that “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.”
The White House also denounced McCaul’s report.
“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,” said Sharon Yang, a White House spokesperson for oversight and investigations.
Republicans accuse Biden admin of pursuing withdrawal ‘no matter the cost’
McCaul formally launched his investigation after assuming the chairmanship of the committee in January 2023, vowing to scrutinize the State Department’s planning, decision-making, and execution of the withdrawal.
The Republican probe included multiple hearings, transcribed interviews with 18 former and current officials, and the review of thousands of pages of documents from the US government.
The resulting report comes away with five conclusions.
It claims the Biden administration was “determined to withdraw from Afghanistan, with or without the Doha Agreement” – an agreement brokered under the Trump administration for a phased but eventual full withdrawal from Afghanistan – “and no matter the cost.” It accuses the administration of ignoring “the conditions in the Doha Agreement, pleas of the Afghan government, and the objections by our NATO allies, deciding to unilaterally withdraw from the country.”
It also accuses the administration of prioritizing “the optics of the withdrawal over the security of U.S. personnel on the ground.” It takes aim at the administration’s delay in ordering a NEO – a fact that has been well-scrutinized and documented. The report said that “Afghanistan once again became a haven for terrorists, including al Qaeda and ISIS-K” following the US withdrawal.
Among the other findings of the report, it said that Special Representative for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad – who was appointed under the Trump administration – was negotiating a succession plan for the Afghan government that included the Taliban, and the committee claims he was “wedded to the idea.”
While the negotiations led by Khalilzad had been widely covered in news reports – and never resulted in an agreement due to the Taliban moving to military take Kabul – the details of what was being pursued remained unclear at times.
Khalilzad, who participated in a transcribed interview with the committee, said that “the power-sharing demand increased from 50-50, to 60-40 in favor of the Taliban, to 70-30 in favor of the Taliban,” the report writes. Khalilzad noted in his interview: “As the balance shifted on the ground … the negotiations on the government continued, but the dollar demand with it increased.”
The report also cites comments that Biden administration officials made to the public around the time of the withdrawal which contradicted the information that the US government had about the situation on the ground.
For example, in October 2021, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki claimed it would have taken 5,000 troops to protect the Bagram Air Force Base, which the US handed over to the Afghans in July of 2021. Yet General McKenzie testified to the committee that “at 2,500 U.S. forces, if you also assume that will allow the Afghans to stay in the fight, you can maintain a viable base at Bagram.” He added that he had believed maintaining Bagram was critical to stability in the country. Psaki also made public comments stating that no one could have assessed that the Afghan military would fall as quickly as it did, despite existing US government assessments at the time predicting that a fall could happen swiftly.
The Democratic memorandum outlines its separate takeaways from the hearings, documents, and transcribed interviews. It argues that the Trump administration set the withdrawal in motion and “failed to plan for executing it.” It also claims that the Biden administration initiated a “robust” process to review the evacuation. The memorandum argues that the fall of Kabul to the Taliban “precipitously changed the situation in Kabul and prompted a dynamic and unprecedented U.S. government response that protected Americans, our allies, and our interests.”
Moreover, Meeks’ memorandum argues that the findings are not new —”it comports with what Administration officials, the State Department’s own After-Action Review on Afghanistan (AAR), and extensive press reporting have already said repeatedly over years about the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
“This narrative is also not without points of debate – such as over whether to retain a small force in Afghanistan, whether U.S. analysts should have better anticipated the fall of the Afghan government and rapid speed of the Taliban’s takeover, or the precise timing of shifting from civilian-led evacuation flights to a NEO – but no thorough policy process would be, nor do any Commander-in-Chief’s decisions satisfy everyone,” it says.
Democrats’ memorandum on the report
Meeks said he released his own memorandum because “American taxpayers have funded this Committee’s oversight, and the American people deserve the truth.”
The New York Democrat also accused his Republican colleagues of further politicizing the matter ahead of the election.
“With the ascendance of Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, the GOP performance has reached a crescendo — Republicans now claim she was the architect of the U.S. withdrawal though she is referenced only three times in 3,288 pages of the Committee’s interview transcripts,” Meeks charged.
Even with the release of the report, McCaul has made clear that he continues to pursue his probe as Election Day nears and even after.
“We have a lot of unanswered questions regarding the” Department of Defense, McCaul told CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday, ahead of the report’s publication. He said “didn’t reach any conclusions” regarding the Abbey Gate attack at the Kabul airport. That deadly attack, which was claimed by ISIS-K has been the subject of multiple investigations.
The Republican Chairman has subpoenaed Secretary of State Antony Blinken to testify on the report. Some of the recommendations of the report call for the testimony of officials like national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
“Congress has a responsibility to ensure those at fault during the Afghanistan withdraw are finally held accountable,” the report says.
On the eve of the report’s release McCaul said that the conduct of the withdrawal amounted to “moral negligence of the administration.”
“This was one of the deadliest days in Afghanistan. It could have been prevented if the State Department did its job by law and executed the plan of evacuation. They did not do that until, until the day that the Taliban invaded and overran Kabul. By that time, it was too late,” McCaul said on CBS.
McCaul also claimed that the release of the report at this time was not an effort to play politics, pointing to the many roadblocks that the committee faced as they tried to gather information and conduct interviews.
But State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a statement to CNN that “it remains deeply disappointing that House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans used this process to politicize Afghanistan policy instead of working on legislative solutions to strengthen our country.”
“They have done a disservice by relying on false information and presenting inaccurate narratives meant only to harm the Administration, instead of seeking to actually inform Americans on how our longest war came to an end,” Miller said. “The State Department remains immensely proud of its workforce who put themselves forward in the waning days of our presence in Afghanistan to evacuate both Americans and the brave Afghans who stood by over sides for more than two decades.”
Yang, the White House spokesperson, also defended the administration’s decisions and cast blame on Trump and the Doha agreement brokered under his presidency, saying Biden “inherited an untenable position.”
“As we have said many times, ending our longest war was the right thing to do and our nation is stronger today as a result,” Yang said in a statement to CNN. “Bringing our troops home after 20 years put us in a stronger position by allowing us to redirect our resources to confront threats to international peace and stability, such as Russia’s war in Ukraine, an ongoing crisis in the Middle East, China’s increasingly aggressive actions, and terror threats that exist around the world.”
In June 2023, the State Department released its long-awaited Afghanistan After Action Review report, which found that both the Trump and Biden administrations’ decisions to pull all US troops from Afghanistan had detrimental consequences, and detailed damning shortcomings by the current administration that led to the deadly and chaotic US withdrawal from that country after nearly two decades on the ground.
The report made recommendations for the future, mostly related to the Department’s crisis response and preparedness. Both the State Department report and the Republicans’ report recommended putting a single point person in charge at the department when there is a complex crisis unfolding.
This story has been updated with additional reporting.
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