Secretary of State Antony Blinken failed to produce eight key documents to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on its withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan two years ago, according to a news report published Saturday.
The State Department provided the committee with 300 documents related to the Afghanistan withdrawal on Thursday, but eight documents requested by committee chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) in a letter on Aug. 9, were not among them, including several memos from Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security Todd Brown that McCaul said were identified in the Afghanistan After-Action Review.
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"The AAR files are necessary to inform the Committee’s consideration of potential legislation aimed at helping prevent the catastrophic mistakes of the withdrawal from happening again," McCaul said in a statement on Aug. 10.
The 300 documents largely contained information that was already publicly available, an unnamed committee source told Just The News. The deadline to provide the committee with all its requested documents was Tuesday.
Critics of the withdrawal have called it "disastrous" after more than 170 people were killed during the Taliban takeover, and 13 military servicemembers. McCaul has vowed to get more answers from the Biden administration on the evacuation, including information on why a request for a preemptive airstrike was denied when United States intelligence knew ISIS was planning an attack to kill Americans.
“I will not rest until we get answers and accountability as to what happened,” McCaul said. “How did this go so wrong?”
The after-action report published this summer found that both the Biden and Trump administrations exhibited "insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios and how quickly those might follow" in pushing to meet the deadline for withdrawal.
The report also found that the U.S. overestimated the capabilities of the now-defunct democratically elected Afghan government to survive Taliban offenses and that a clear lack of communication between the Pentagon and State Department, and even among leaders within those separate bodies, further exacerbated the situation.
The two-year anniversary of the evacuation passed silently by the White House on Tuesday. But Blinken maintained that the administration made the right decision in pulling its forces out of the Middle Eastern country.
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"The decision to withdraw from Afghanistan was an incredibly difficult one, but also the right one," Blinken told reporters. "We ended America’s longest war. For the first time in 20 years, we don’t have another generation of young Americans going to fight and die in Afghanistan."
White House officials did not say whether the president will speak about the withdrawal later this month but claimed the anniversary of the full evacuation takes place at the end of the month.