Republicans blame Biden for disastrous US exit from Afghanistan a year after Taliban took Kabul

It’s been one year since Afghanistan’s government fell and Republicans are vowing to hold President Joe Biden accountable for the disastrous troop withdrawal that paved the way for the Taliban to rise to power.

Meanwhile, the White House is still on clean-up duty defending the move and is circulating a memo on Capitol Hill claiming the withdrawal strengthened U.S. national security interest by freeing up military and intelligence agents who were serving in Afghanistan over the last 20 years.

The blame game comes as Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee released an interim report Sunday, which placed the onus on President Joe Biden and highlighted the failures of the administration’s preparations for evacuations.

National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson’s memo is a rebuttal that blames former President Donald Trump for reaching the Doha agreement, which was a deal struck with the Taliban to evacuate the U.S. from Afghanistan by May 2021.

While the finger-pointing goes on in Washington, Biden remains on Kiawah Island, South Carolina on Monday for his nearly one-week-long family beach vacation.

‘The interim report is riddled with inaccurate characterizations, cherry-picked information, and false claims,’ Watson wrote in her memo responding to the GOP’s report.

With the total withdrawal on August 30, 2021, hundreds of Americans were left behind – and a new report shows 800 Americans were brought back from Afghanistan since then. Pictured: Hundreds of people run alongside a U.S. Air force C-17 transport plane on August 16, 2021  

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden continued on Monday his family vacation on Kiawah Island, South Carolina. The president was spotted riding his bike on the beach Sunday, August 14, 2021 with first lady Jill and granddaughter Finnegan Biden

Biden’s deadline for withdrawal angered many – September 11, 2021. But the total U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan completed on August 30, 2021 when the final C-17 carried the last American troops out of Afghanistan, marking the formal end of the longest war in U.S. history.

August 15, 2021 was the day when Taliban fighters entered Kabul, the capital city of Afghanistan, and President Ashraf Ghani fled.

Republicans and Democrats are using the one-year anniversary of the Taliban takeover to reexamine the events of last year, which led to the suicide bombing deaths of 13 U.S. service members and resulting in leaving behind hundreds of Americans and thousands of Afghan allies.

Since the Taliban came to power and all troops left Afghanistan, the U.S. government has evacuated more than 800 American citizens, according to data House GOP investigators and the State Department provided to Politico.

While the data indicates the ongoing efforts to bring Americans home, it also proves that hundreds more citizens were left behind in Afghanistan than the 100-200 previously thought to be left there upon total withdrawal.

Two weeks after the last U.S. military plane left Kabul, Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken told lawmakers there were only 100 Americans citizens left in Afghanistan who wanted to leave.

By February 2022, according to a GOP Senate Foreign Relations Committee report, the U.S. evacuated 479 Americans from Afghanistan. And House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Republican staff have now found in an investigation into the withdrawal that 800 Americans were helped out of Afghanistan following the withdrawal.

GOP Representative Michael McCaul of Texas led the interim report. He is the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, likely to become chair of the panel if Republicans retake a majority in the 2022 midterm election in November.

Taliban fighters ride in a convoy near the U.S. embassy in Kabul on Monday, August 15, 2021 in marking one year since they took control of Afghanistan upon the U.S. troop withdrawal 

The report claims Biden’s decisions on how to conduct that evacuation were to blame for the disastrous turnout, not the timeline put in place by Trump’s agreement.

‘There was a complete lack and a failure to plan. There was no plan and there was no plan executed,’ McCaul said on CBS’ Sunday morning program Face the Nation. ‘There were so many mistakes.’ 

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy vowed in a Monday op-ed that Republicans would continue to seek answers regarding the withdrawal, including the report released the day prior.

‘These strategic failures are too grave to ignore,’ he penned after noting the Americans left behind, service members killed, billions in military equipment left for the Taliban taking and the swift fall of the government the U.S. tried to uphold for two decades.

‘That is why House Republicans are committed to pursuing answers to Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal,’ McCarthy added in the Fox News op-ed. ‘As a part of those efforts, this week Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee will publish a comprehensive report that sheds light on the catastrophic flaws of Biden’s Afghanistan disaster.’

Ex-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said in a CNN interview that aired Sunday that Biden’s withdrawal announcement helped lead to international community dropping support for his government and the Taliban’s ultimate rise

Despite a consensus that the withdrawal was botched, the White House claims in its Capitol Hill memo that what Republicans wanted was a ‘false choice.’

‘Our top intelligence professionals assessed – and recent history had shown – that we’d ultimately need to send more American troops into harm’s way just to keep the stalemate in a 20-year war from degrading,’ Watson wrote in her memo.

‘The President rejected the impossible notion that a so-called low-grade effort could have maintained a stalemate,’ she added. ‘There’s nothing low-grade, low-risk, or low-cost about any war – and there were no signs that even more time, funds, or even more importantly Americans at risk in Afghanistan, would have yielded different results.’

The memo also touted the recent strike that killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri as proof the U.S. doesn’t need to maintain a permanent troop presence to take down terrorism.

While a somber day for the U.S. defense and national security community, the Taliban is celebrating on Monday, August 15.

Fighters chant victory slogans next to the U.S. embassy in Kabul on Monday to mark the one-year anniversary of their return to power in Afghanistan.

Taliban fighters fire shots into the air as they dispersed a rare rally of woman chanting ‘Bread, work and freedom’ as they marched in front of the education ministry building and held their fists in the air on August 13, 2021

The last year has been turbulent in Afghanistan, with woman seeing their rights crush and a humanitarian crisis in the country worsening.

‘We fulfilled the obligation of jihad and liberated our country,’ said Niamatullah Hekmat, a fighter who entered the capital on August 15, 2021 just hours after then-president Ghani fled the country.

‘It’s the day of victory and happiness for the Afghan Muslims and people. It is the day of conquest and victory of the white flag,’ government spokesman Bilal Karimi said on Twitter.