The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Monday released its 300-page report on the disastrous Biden-Harris withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The report was unsparing in its criticism – particularly of the decisions that led to the deaths of 13 U.S. service members in a suicide bombing attack on the Kabul airport on August 26, 2021.
The report, entitled Willful Blindness: An Assessment of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Chaos that Followed, has been under construction for almost two years.
Committee chairman Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) strove to portray the investigation as sincere and detail-oriented, rather than a partisan attack. Publishing it two days before the only debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump will not increase the odds of Democrats accepting the work as nonpartisan, but McCaul and his caucus stuffed the report with receipts for every contentious point it makes.
“This was one of the deadliest days in Afghanistan. It could have been prevented if the State Department did its job by law and executed the plan of evacuation. They left these 13 service men and women hanging out to dry … as a result of the, I’d say, moral negligence on the part of the administration allowing this to happen,” McCaul told CBS News on Sunday, referring to the Abbey Gate bombing in Kabul.
The report’s authors aggressively debunked the Biden-Harris talking point that they were merely executing a withdrawal arranged by Trump with the Taliban before he left office. The report noted that Biden and Harris violated numerous provisions of that arrangement, known as the Doha Agreement, as well as ignoring input from NATO allies and the soon-to-be-overthrown Afghan government.
The authors contended that many mistakes were made because the Biden-Harris administration “prioritized the optics of the withdrawal over the security of U.S. personnel on the ground.” This commitment to optics and political manipulation also led the administration to aggressively deceive the American people about the withdrawal.
“This coverup included mid-level administration officials all the way up to the Oval Office. And as this investigation reveals, the National Security Council and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan were the source of the majority of that misinformation campaign,” the authors said.
The report described the withdrawal as a “slow-moving train wreck,” a phrase coined by National Security Council (NSC) deputy homeland security adviser Russ Travers. The Biden-Harris approach combined all the worst features of rash, thoughtless action and endless dithering.
Besides its obsession with optics, the administration’s foundational error was its apparent belief that American military forces could be swiftly pulled out of Afghanistan while the diplomatic mission was left in place, or even expanded.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Afghanistan ambassador Ross Wilson emerge as major villains in the report, with Blinken little short of delusional about keeping the U.S. embassy open for business while the murderous extremists of the Taliban rolled into Kabul. Wilson actually fought departure orders by “playing shell games with staff and forcing embassy personnel to return after R&R leave.”
Biden and Harris made some decisions that House investigators and their interview subjects were still struggling to understand three years later, such as the infamous decision to throw away vital American bases like Bagram before the withdrawal operation was complete, and simply ignoring warnings from the Pentagon that abruptly pulling out American contractors would effectively disable the Afghan military – the very force the White House expected to maintain order until the withdrawal was complete.
Rarely have deer looked at oncoming headlights with more shock and incomprehension than the Biden-Harris White House beheld the swift collapse of the Afghan military, or the gigantic mobs of terrified people that swarmed the Kabul airport, seeking to escape the oncoming extremist tyranny. Evidence abounds that the administration was not prepared for the horror it unleashed. Team Biden did not even provide enough food and water for the American government personnel stranded in Kabul.
The cascade of bad decisions that led to the Abbey Gate bombing was partly a consequence of the administration’s panicked reactions to how bad the Afghanistan withdrawal looked on TV, according to the House report. Threat warnings of an imminent ISIS-K attack were ignored because the administration wanted to clean up the mob of terrified civilians clogging the airport as quickly as possible.
The “optics” of the diminished U.S. military force at the airport trying to conduct a preemptive attack on Islamic State terrorists would have been dicey, especially if such an attack went sideways and resulted in American military and/or Afghan civilian casualties. When Marines deployed at the airport spotted a potential suicide bomber, they passed their warning up the chain of command – and never heard back.
Even after years of digging into the Abbey Gate bombing, House Foreign Affairs investigators found it maddeningly difficult to pin down exactly what happened on that day, who started shooting after the suicide bomb detonated, or who they were shooting at.
The report condemned the Defense Department’s destruction of relevant records as “inexcusable” and also blasted the administration for stonewalling both congressional oversight and the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).
Willful Blindness covers the aftermath of the Afghanistan withdrawal in depth, beginning with the “disregard and disrespect” President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have shown to the Gold Star families of the 13 United States service members killed in the Kabul bombing.
Other consequences of the debacle include reduced military recruitment and retention, the Taliban’s horrible oppression of the Afghan people, and the damage to American credibility in the eyes of malevolent powers like Russia, China, and Iran. The report cited concerns that current and potential U.S. allies are now looking at Russia and China as more reliable great-power allies.
“What happened after Afghanistan impacted the world. Why? Because Putin responded by invading Ukraine two months after Afghanistan fell. Chairman Xi [and] Putin made an unholy alliance in Beijing, threatening the Pacific now, and then the Ayatollah reared his ugly head in the Middle East,” McCaul told CBS News on Sunday.
McCaul pointed out that at least eight terrorists released from Bagram prison during the chaotic withdrawal have been caught trying to cross the southern border, which Biden and Harris refuse to secure. The Afghanistan disaster will likely haunt Americans in a variety of ways for years to come.
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