GOP Report: Biden Left More than 800 Americans Behind in Afghanistan

Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee released a report Sunday detailing the initial results of their investigation of the Biden administration’s handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal.

Republican members interviewed people on the ground during the withdrawal, reviewed hundreds of situational reports, interviewed whistleblowers, obtained internal State Department memos, and took fact-finding trips to Pakistan, UAE, and Qatar.

They also found that despite the Biden administration claiming there were only 100-200 Americans still left in Afghanistan, there were more than 800 Americans abandoned behind enemy lines.

The report’s executive summary stated:

The State Department has evacuated more than 800 American citizens from the country since August 31, 2022. That does not include the AMCITS evacuated by outside groups. And it is clearly dramatically more than the number of “about 100” that we were repeatedly told after the NEO ended. For perspective, the Iran hostage situation in 1979 saw 52 Americans left in the country.

They also found that the Taliban offered on August 15, 2021, for the U.S. to provide its own security for the Kabul airport instead of Taliban forces, but that the U.S. turned them down — which allowed for the chaos unfolding just outside the gates of the airport with little security and the subsequent bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members. GOP investigators found:

The lack of planning by the Biden administration and their refusal to accept the Taliban’s offer to secure Kabul during the NEO directly led to the bombing being so deadly. The chaos at the gates and the Taliban’s inability to control the perimeter meant that U.S. military personnel were closely packed together as they sought to screen would be-evacuees, placing them in a more vulnerable situation that was exploited by the bomber, contributing to the high number of casualties.

They found that after President Joe Biden announced his decision in May 2021 to unconditionally withdrawal all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021, the administration took little action to prepare for the withdrawal.

According to sources on the ground who spoke to the investigators, the word “NEO” — for non-combat evacuation operation — was not allowed to be used. It was not until June 28, 2021, that senior diplomats were willing to entertain the possibility of a NEO, but no decisions were made to prepare for it, the report said.

The report revealed that the embassy only requested military assistance on August 11, 2021 — just four days before the Taliban takeover and did not make key decisions about evacuations until August 14, 2021 — just hours before the Taliban seized Kabul.

GOP investigators said the delay led to overcrowding issues and suspensions of flights, and deteriorating humanitarian conditions. Breitbart News has previously reported that there were fights, death, and human waste problems inside evacuation transit centers. LINK

The report also said there were only 36 consular officers on the ground in Kabul, despite needing to process more than 100,000 evacuees, the report said. The lack of consular officers slowed down the evacuation and likely led to sloppy processing, the report said.

And there was little effort to evacuate a “significant” number of U.S. special operations forces-trained Afghan commandos, many who fled into Iran because they lacked other little choice and now present a potential security threat, the report said.

“Biden administration has to this day failed to make any effort to prioritize the evacuation of U.S.-trained Afghan commandos and other elite units who possess sensitive knowledge about U.S military operations. Many of those personnel have been forced to seek refuge in Iran where they could be exploited for their information,” the report said.

Some Afghan commandos also brought military equipment and vehicles with them, which could also be exploited by Iran, the report said.

The report said the NEO was so poorly planned and operated that senior administration officials including Vice President Kamala Harris, First Lady Jill Biden, and even one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had reached out to outside veteran groups to evacuate people.

Some 1,450 Afghan children were evacuated without their parents, and efforts to reunite many of these separated children with their relatives are ongoing months after their arrival in the U.S., the report said.

The report also criticized senior Biden administration officials for issuing “wildly pollyannish statements about progress at the airport and the Taliban’s cooperation in carrying out the evacuation.”

The Biden administration also failed to secure agreements with any of Afghanistan’s neighbors that would allow the U.S. military to establish bases to allow for continued counterterrorism or intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) operations against a resurgent al Qaeda and ISIS-K.

“To this day, we still have no such basing agreements with neighboring countries,” the report said.

Republicans said Afghanistan has once again become a terrorist safe haven, as evidenced by al-Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri’s recent killing in Kabul.

The report concluded:

President Biden has also repeatedly attempted to claim that these outcomes were unavoidable, saying in August 20201, “The idea that somehow there’s a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don’t know how that happens.” But those who have paid attention, especially those brave volunteers who stepped up and helped rescue thousands of vulnerable Afghans when the U.S. government was missing in action, know that this is not the truth.

Republicans on the committee are preparing to conduct a “much more thorough examination.” They said that attempts to receive documentation and transcribed interviews have been ignored by the State Department. Republicans are poised to use subpoena power to wrest control of those documents if they regain control of the House this November.