(CNSNews.com) – Eighteen months after the tumultuous ending of the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan, the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal will be examined on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee, now under Republican control, is holding a public hearing on what its chairman has called “one of the worst foreign policy failures in American history.”
Among those testifying before the committee will be the representatives of Task Force Pineapple and Allied Airlift 21, two volunteer organizations that worked to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies from Kabul after it fell to the Taliban.
Also on the panel are a U.S. Marine sniper and a former U.S. Army combat medic who were deployed at Kabul airport during the chaotic withdrawal in August 2021.
The hearing is entitled, “During and After the Fall of Kabul: Examining the Administration’s Emergency Evacuation from Afghanistan.”
It comes seven months after the committee’s then Republican minority published an interim report examining the withdrawal, characterizing it as a “strategic failure,” and criticizing the administration for not adequately preparing for the Taliban takeover.
A leaked White House memo responding to that report said it was “riddled with inaccurate characterizations, cherry-picked information, and false claims.”
Among other things, the memo charged that the Doha agreement reached between the Trump administration and the Taliban in February 2020 “empowered the Taliban, weakened our partners in the Afghan government, and committed to withdrawing our troops a few months after President Biden’s inauguration – with no clear plan for what should come next.”
Pushing back at the assertions in the memo, the committee’s then-ranking member Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said most of the administration’s claims were “demonstrably false, and are clear attempts to rewrite history in an effort to sweep one of the worst foreign policy failures in American history under the rug.”
McCaul, now chairman, will preside at Wednesday’s hearing.
For almost 18 months, the committee has been trying to get access to key State Department documents relating to the withdrawal.
In a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday, McCaul wrote that while the department had eventually provided 236 pages of documents, 88 comprised of an Afghanistan Study Group report that has been public since February 2021; 18 were the unclassified opening statements from a June 2022 hearing on Afghanistan, and “[m]ost of the remaining pages included extensive redactions that severely limit their usability and value.”
McCaul expressed frustration at the department’s failure to hand over three sets of documents in particular:
--A “Dissent Channel” cable reportedly sent by 23 State Department officials on July 13, 2021, and the department’s response to it.
--An “After-Action Report” commissioned by Blinken in late 2021, led by Ambassador Daniel Smith, a veteran diplomat.
--Two versions of the “emergency action plan” of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul – both the one that was in place on January 1, 2021, and the final iteration of the plan before the embassy was closed.
In the case of the “Dissent Channel” cable, McCaul noted in his letter that the then-chairman of the committee, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), had first requested it in writing as long ago as August 21, 2021, just days after Kabul fell to the Taliban and while the evacuation mission was still underway.
“Notably, Chairman Meeks issued the request with a three-day deadline of August 24, 2021 – a testament to the document’s significance and the request’s urgency,” McCaul wrote Blinken.
“However, this longstanding Committee request, issued under a chairman’s signature by two successive chairmen of different parties, remains unfulfilled after nearly 18 months.
McCaul concluded by urging Blinken to “immediately” produce the three sets of documents, and to provide them “completely and without redaction.”
The Doha agreement signed in early 2020 paved the way for the U.S. troop withdrawal and an end to the 20-year war. It linked the departure of U.S. troops with a political transition based on intra-Afghan negotiations – a commitment flagrantly violated by the Taliban.
May 1, 2021 was the envisaged deadline for the troops’ departure, although Biden that April postponed pushed it back, saying while the withdrawal would begin on May 1, the last troops would be out by September 11 of that year.
As the due date drew nearer, Taliban fighters seized districts and provincial capitals across the country. In mid-August President Ashraf Ghani fled and the capital fell to the terrorist group.
The Pentagon was then compelled to send troops back into Afghanistan to oversee a two-week-long evacuation mission from Kabul airport.
More than 120,000 people were flown out of the country, but a terrorist attack at the airport perimeter on August 26 killed 13 U.S. service personnel and more than 160 Afghan civilians.