House Republicans release partisan report blaming Biden for disastrous end to US war in Afghanistan

WASHINGTON — House Republicans released a damning report Sunday on their investigation into the US withdrawal from Afghanistanblaming the disastrous end of America’s Longest War on President Joe Biden’s administration and downplaying the role of former President Donald Trump, who signed the withdrawal deal with the Taliban.

The partisan overview chronicles the last months of military and civilian failures following Trump’s February 2020 withdrawal agreement, which allowed America’s fundamentalist Taliban enemy to conquer the entire country before the last U.S. officials left on August 30, 2021. The chaotic exodus left many American citizens behind, Afghan allies on the battlefieldwomen activists and others at risk from the Taliban.

But the House Republican report is hardly news, as withdrawal has been extensively advocated by several independent assessments. Previous investigations and analyses have pointed to a systemic failure spanning the last four presidential administrations and concluded that Biden and Trump bear the brunt of the blame.

Republican Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, who led the investigation as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the GOP investigation shows the Biden administration “had the information and the ability to take the necessary steps to plan for the inevitable collapse of the Afghan government so that we could safely evacuate American personnel, American citizens, green card holders and our brave Afghan allies.”

“However, at every step of the process, the government has prioritized optics over safety,” he said in a statement.

McCaul denied earlier in the day that the timing of the report’s release before the presidential election was political or that Republicans were ignoring Trump’s mistakes in withdrawing from the US.

Biden came into office with the determination that “we would get out of there as quickly as possible, regardless of the circumstances on the ground” in Afghanistan, McCaul told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

House Democrats said in a statement that the report by their Republican colleagues “selectively selected witness testimony to exclude anything that would not be helpful to a biased, partisan narrative about the withdrawal from Afghanistan” and ignored facts about Trump’s role.

The more than 18-month investigation by Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee focused on the months leading up to the U.S. troop withdrawal, finding that Biden and his administration undermined senior officials and ignored warnings as the Taliban seized key cities far more quickly than most U.S. officials expected or prepared for.

“I called their advance ‘the Red Blob,’” retired Col. Seth Krummrich said of the Taliban, telling the commission that at Special Operations Central Command, where he was chief of staff, “he watched the Taliban advance every day, and it looked like there was a red blob swallowing up territory.”

“I don’t think we ever thought — you know, nobody ever talked about, ‘Well, what’s going to happen if the Taliban come over the wall?’” Carol Perez, the State Department’s acting undersecretary for management at the time of the withdrawal, said of what House Republicans called minimal planning by the State Department before abandoning the embassy in mid-August 2021 when the Taliban invaded Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.

The withdrawal ended a nearly two-decade occupation by U.S. and allied forces that had begun to root out the al Qaeda militants responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. The Taliban had allowed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to find refuge in Afghanistan. Committee officials noted that since the U.S. withdrawal, there have been reports of the group rebuilding in Afghanistan, including a U.N. report of as many as eight al Qaeda training camps there.

The Taliban overthrew an Afghan government and army that the U.S. had spent nearly 20 years and trillions of dollars building in hopes of preventing the country from once again becoming a base for anti-Western extremists.

A 2023 US Government Watchdog Report on US in Afghanistan points in particular to Trump’s February 2020 deal with the Taliban, in which he agreed to the withdrawal of all US troops and military contractors by spring of next year, and to the determination of both Trump and Biden to continue withdrawing US troops despite the Taliban violating key commitments in the withdrawal deal.

The more than 350-page document from House Republicans is the product of hours of testimony — including with former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, retired U.S. Central Command Gen. Frank McKenzie and others who were senior officials at the time — seven public hearings and roundtable discussions, as well as more than 20,000 pages of State Department documents reviewed by the committees.

Now that Biden has dropped out of the race, Trump and his Republican allies have tried to spin the withdrawal as a campaign issue against Vice President Kamala Harris, who is now Trump’s Democratic opponent in the presidential race.

The House Republican report cites Harris’ overall responsibility as Biden’s adviser, but makes no reference to any specific advice or actions by Harris that contributed to the many failures.

Some highlights from the report:

Republicans point to testimony and documents alleging that the Biden administration’s reliance on input from military and civilian leaders on the ground in Afghanistan was “severely limited” in the months leading up to the withdrawal, with most decision-making taking place by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, without consultation with key stakeholders.

The report shows that Biden went ahead with the withdrawal despite the Taliban failing to honor a number of commitments in the deal, including breaking a promise to enter into talks with the then US-backed Afghan government.

According to the report, former State Department spokesman Ned Price testified to the committee that compliance with the Doha deal was “immaterial” to Biden’s decision to withdraw.

Earlier reports stated that Trump was also implementing the first steps of the withdrawal deal, reducing US troop levels from around 13,000 to an eventual 2,500, despite the Taliban initially failing to adhere to some parts of the deal and despite the Taliban stepping up attacks on Afghan forces.

The House report criticizes a U.S. diplomat for Afghanistan, former ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, not Trump, for the Trump administration’s actions in negotiating with the Taliban. The new report says Trump followed the recommendations of U.S. military leaders by making sharp cuts to the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan after the signing.

The report also details the vulnerability of U.S. embassy staff in Kabul as the Biden administration planned its departure. Republicans allege the Biden administration had a “dogmatic insistence” on maintaining a large diplomatic footprint despite concerns about the lack of security for staff after U.S. troops left.

McKenzie, one of two U.S. generals overseeing the evacuation, told lawmakers that the administration’s insistence on keeping the embassy open and fully operational was the “fatal mistake that led to what happened in August,” the report said.

The committee’s report alleges that State Department officials went so far as to water down or even “completely rewrite” reports from the heads of diplomatic security and the Defense Department that had warned of threats to U.S. personnel as the withdrawal date approached.

“We were still planning” when Kabul fell, Perez, the top US diplomat, testified before the committee.

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Associated Press editor Rebecca Santana contributed to this report.