Congress revisited the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and the current threat level from the country where the United States was at war for 20 years in a pair of hearings Wednesday.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee heard from six witnesses in a hearing that focused on evacuation efforts during the final two weeks of the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan in August 2021.
Two witnesses had been at Hamid Karzai International Airport, where the evacuations were taking place, when a suicide bomber killed 13 U.S. service members and roughly 170 Afghan civilians. Three others were among the hundreds of veterans who participated in ad hoc groups helping to get Afghan allies out of the country. The sixth witness was the executive director of an immigrant nonprofit group that has helped Afghans resettle in the U.S.
PREVIEWING FIRST GOP-LED HEARING ON AFGHAN WITHDRAWAL: 'STUNNING FAILURE OF LEADERSHIP'
Marine Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews emotionally recounted the Aug. 26, 2021, bombing, in which he lost an arm and a leg. Although he had identified a suspect he still believes to be the bomber beforehand, he was not given the green light by his superiors to take out the threat.
"Throughout the entirety of the day on August 26, 2021, we disseminated the suicide bomber information to ground forces at Abbey Gate. ... Over the communication network, we passed that there was a potential threat and an attack imminent. This was as serious as it could get," he explained. "Eventually, the individual disappeared. To this day, we believe he was a suicide bomber. We made everyone on the ground aware. Operations had briefly halted but then started again. Plain and simple, we were ignored. Our expertise was disregarded. No one was held accountable for our safety."
He called the withdrawal a "catastrophe, in my opinion" and said "it was an inexcusable lack of accountability and negligence," while Aiden Gunderson, a former Army combat medic who was deployed twice to Afghanistan and assisted with the evacuation, told the committee the withdrawal was "an organization failure at multiple levels."
Both relived the painful and tragic memories of the bombing, also describing the desperation and fear of the thousands of Afghans that swarmed the airport gates every day for those two weeks despite tremendous heat and overcrowding, hoping and praying to be selected by U.S. forces to get on a plane out of Afghanistan.
Francis Hoang, Lt. Col. Scott Mann, and Peter Lucier worked with separate groups that worked tirelessly to navigate Afghan allies through Kabul and into the confines of the airport. Each spoke about the deep emotional strife they felt, which they said was a feeling shared by countless veterans, as the U.S. military left on Aug. 30, 2021, with an untold number of Afghan allies at risk under the Taliban regime left behind. They frequently referenced the thoughts and feelings of veterans at large who were left mentally wounded by how the end of the war played out.
Mann referenced a friend who ended his life a few months ago, saying the friend's wife "confirmed to me that the Afghan abandonment reactivated all of the demons that he had managed to put behind him from our time in Afghanistan together."
Members of both parties thanked the witnesses for their tireless work. There was a nearly complete partisan divide about blaming the Biden administration for what happened. House Republicans have been eager to hold hearings on the withdrawal since regaining the majority this year. Democrats frequently pointed to the longevity of the war and argued that previous administrations set up untenable conditions.
The special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction, which has provided oversight to the U.S. mission in Afghanistan for more than a decade, substantially blamed the Trump administration's deal with the Taliban for a negotiated withdrawal in February 2020.
On the other side of the Capitol, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, CIA Director William Burns, Defense Intelligence Agency Director Scott Berrier, National Security Agency Director Paul Nakasone, and FBI Director Christopher Wray testified on their current threat assessments globally to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Berrier acknowledged that his agency's "reach and grasp into that nation since the fall of the government has eroded over time, but we still have some access, and I would say, based on what we know right now from the threat of al Qaeda, they're trying to survive basically without a real plan to at least, or intent to, attack the West anytime soon," though he warned, "ISIS-K poses a bit of a larger threat, but they are under attack from the Taliban regime right now, and it's a matter of time before they may have the ability and intent to actually attack the West at this point."
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Nakasone affirmed that assessment, saying the NSA sees "the same challenges across the [intelligence community] with some of our collection. But we do see a challenge ISIS-K in Afghanistan right now is a battle with the Taliban."
Also on Wednesday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its report on worldwide threats, which noted that ISIS-K “almost certainly retains the intent to conduct operations in the West and will continue efforts to attack outside of Afghanistan” while it will “maintain its campaign against the Taliban and religious minorities.”