WASHINGTON — A scathing House Republican report blames President Joe Biden’s administration for the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Rep. Michael McCaul, the Austin Republican who oversaw the report, said the messy exit emboldened U.S. enemies around the world. Democrats charged the report unfairly favored certain facts, minimized former President Donald Trump’s role and was timed to help Trump in this year’s campaign.
On Capitol Hill Monday, relatives of some of the 13 U.S. service members killed in a suicide bombing during the withdrawal from Afghanistan called the deaths avoidable. They were killed at the Abbey Gate outside of the Kabul International Airport.
“We have a father who is never going to know his daughter, a daughter who will never know her father, a wife who lost her husband, and a family that is never going to be allowed to grow,” Jim McCollum said. His son, Marine Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum, was among the service members killed.
They stood alongside House Republicans who released a three-year investigation that held President Joe Biden and his administration responsible for the chaotic withdrawal. After 20 years, the U.S. military left Afghanistan in August 2021.
McCaul led the review as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He told Spectrum News it was “too little, too late.”
“We threw our Marines in a really bad situation at the very end, under an intense threat that culminates in a suicide bomb attack killing 13 servicemen and women, 170 Afghans and 45 Americans and Afghans wounded,” McCaul said.
McCaul said the Biden administration ignored warnings and did not plan for the collapse of the Afghan government, leaving Americans and Afghan allies vulnerable.
“The go to zero order by [Biden] was to remove all military forces, but also air cover contractors, everything. Once that was done, the Afghan military had no chance of victory, and we saw the Taliban very rapidly taking over provincial capitals leading up to Kabul,” McCaul continued.
“Look at the consequences of this. Putin invades Ukraine. Chairman Xi is threatening Taiwan, the Ayatollah is lighting up in the Middle East, all the adversaries. When you project weakness, you invite aggression,” he continued.
Democrats criticized the review, saying Republicans downplayed the Trump administration’s role.
“The Republican majority has taken particular pains to avoid facts involving former President Trump — including his committing the United States to a full, date-specific withdrawal in a deal he negotiated with the Taliban that excluded the Afghan government or any reference to the rights of Afghan women and girls,” said New York Democrat Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, in a letter to House Democrats.
Meeks also criticized how part of the deal allowed the release of thousands of Taliban fighters and he said that Trump’s announcement to withdraw a majority of the troops unilaterally surprised senior officials.
The GOP-led review largely faults the Trump administration’s negotiations with the Taliban, known as the Doha agreement, on a longtime U.S. diplomat for Afghanistan that Trump appointed, former Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.
“We are critical in the report to be objective,” McCaul said. “He decided I’m going to negotiate with the Taliban directly, but not with the Afghan government. So why is that important? That was demoralizing to the Afghan government. It basically said, You’re not important. We’re not going to even put you at the negotiating table. And it caused a lot of problems.”
The White House said the report was based on “cherry-picked facts, inaccurate characterizations, and pre-existing biases.”
“Because of the bad deal former President Trump cut with the Taliban to get out of Afghanistan by May of 2021, President Biden inherited an untenable position. He could either ramp up the war against a Taliban that was at its strongest position in 20 years and put even more American troops at risk or finally end our longest war after two decades and $2 trillion spent. The President refused to send another generation of Americans to fight a war that should have ended long ago,” Sharon Yang, White House spokesperson for oversight and investigations, said in a statement to Spectrum News.
According to an Associated Press analysis, the report provided little detail beyond what was already detailed in several independent reviews. Those previous reviews blamed the last four U.S. presidential administrations for the U.S. failure in Afghanistan and concluded that Biden and Trump share the heaviest blame.
Spectrum News spoke to one expert who agreed the challenges spanned multiple administrations.
“It’s always difficult to withdraw from a war that you’ve been in for a long time, so this would not have been easy for anyone,” said Jeremi Suri, a professor of history and public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
“The decisions that were made earliest by President Bush and then President Obama to surge in Afghanistan. Those are the decisions that were most meaningful, that brought more American Force into this country. Donald Trump and Joe Biden were trying to basically pick up the pieces from failed wars that the United States had fought, and that’s a very difficult thing to do,” Suri said.
McCaul said he plans to continue investigating the Afghanistan withdrawal by looking at the State Department and the National Security Council. He said he also wants to review what happened at Abbey Gate.
On Tuesday, those 13 service members killed in the suicide bombing were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.
“Every family who lost a loved one, every veteran who came home not intact, the PTSD is massive. The suicide rate is massive. They wonder, after the way this was done, ‘was it worth it?’ I think they should all be honored,” McCaul said. “But we have a limited number, 13 children, who were killed by suicide bomber that we want to honor.”