The House investigation into the Biden administration’s military withdrawal from Afghanistan more than two years ago is continuing to progress even as it’s out of the spotlight.
House Foreign Affairs Committee investigators have conducted more than 15 transcribed interviews in the last six months with various current or former administration officials, a committee aide told the Washington Examiner.
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The interviews were with Brian McKeon, former Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources; Amb. Ross Wilson, former chief of mission at Embassy Kabul; Amb. Zalmay Khalilzad, previously the Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation; Ned Price, the former State Department spokesman and now a senior adviser to Secretary Antony Blinken; and Suzy George, Blinken’s chief of staff, among others.
“I’ll say what we’ve learned so far was that this was entirely predictable,” the aide said. “The State Department had blinders up, you know, after the Biden administration took over in January 2021. I’ll say the one thing that has become very apparent through this Kabul-centric approach with respect to Afghan security, and the complete disregard of the Taliban’s rapid monthslong advances across much of the rest of Afghanistan.”
The White House has “entirely stonewalled” the committee’s requests for interviews, the aide added, while the State Department has been more forthcoming with documents and interviews in recent months, but it had been uncooperative as well at the beginning of the investigation.
There are a number of different lines of inquiry the committee is looking into including the Biden administration’s adherence to the Doha Agreement, which the Trump administration signed with the Taliban to confirm the United States would withdraw by May 1, 2021, the decision to give up Bagram Air Base to keep Hamid Karzai International Airport, and the decisions surrounding the non-combatant emergency evacuation efforts.
The committee’s investigators have been carrying on with their inquiry even as the topic faded with the chaos the House experienced this fall ranging from the historic removal of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy to the eruption of conflict in the Middle East.
“The Biden administration would like Americans to forget about its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, which emboldened our adversaries around the world, abandoned our allies and partners, and cost the lives of 13 brave servicemembers,” Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) told the Washington Examiner. “My committee won’t let that happen. We will continue doing whatever it takes to unearth the information necessary to hold those responsible for this cataclysmic failure accountable and ensure nothing like this ever happens again.”
McCaul launched the investigation last January when House Republicans claimed the majority in the lower chamber to look into the decisions made by administration officials during the weeks and months that led up to the military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.
The defining images of the U.S. withdrawal were the thousands of Afghans who rushed to the Kabul airport desperate to get one of the last evacuation flights out of the country. The State Department did not declare the evacuation order until the U.S.-supported Ghani government fell to the Taliban on Aug. 15, 2021, less than three weeks before the intended evacuation date of Sept. 11, which was ultimately pushed up to the end of August.
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U.S. forces were able to evacuate more than 120,000 people, but thousands of U.S. citizens or Afghans who worked with U.S. forces during the two decades of war were left behind. An ISIS-K terrorist detonated a suicide bomb outside the airport gates on August 26, 2021, killing roughly 170 people, including 13 U.S. service members.
The family members of the 13 troops who were killed in the attack participated in a roundtable event with the committee around the two-year anniversary of the bombing, many of whom slammed the Biden administration.
