WASHINGTON — President Biden was so eager to get out of Afghanistan that he Any advice to the contrary is rebukedignored the pleas of the Afghan government and Ignoring objections from American allies.
This was one of the key findings from the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s more than two-year investigation. America's chaotic, deadly Afghanistan withdrawalAccording to a report released on Sunday.
“During his decades-long tenure as a Delaware U.S. Senator, eight years as Vice President of the United States, and nearly four years as President, Mr. Biden has demonstrated a distrust of America’s military experts and advisors and Prioritizes politics and personal legacy “US national security interests are being adversely affected,” the nearly 350-page report said.
The review said his administration repeatedly lied and misled the American public to support his view that the United States should immediately end the 20-year war in Afghanistan.
Former President Donald Trump's administration had already enacted and signed into law a new one. Doha Agreement with the Afghan Government and the Taliban To end the American war in Afghanistan.
But Biden chose to move forward with no particular regard for the terms of the agreement — no matter what it cost him — even though he later blamed that same document for coercing him, the report found.
The Doha Agreement in 2020 stated that the US would withdraw its troops from Afghanistan if the Taliban fulfilled certain obligations.
For example, according to the report, the terrorist group was responsible for “breaking ties with al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, stopping attacks on US and coalition troops, reducing violence against Afghan forces, and beginning negotiations with the Afghan government.”
But the document says Biden's reckless, blind determination bypassed crucial details of the agreement.
all for show
On February 4, 2021, then-State Department spokesman Ned Price announced that the United States would launch a review to assess the Taliban's adherence to the Doha Agreement in order to evaluate whether the United States should withdraw from Afghanistan immediately.
But the document found that “in his testimony before the Committee, contrary to his public statements, Mr. Price asserted that the Taliban’s adherence to the Doha Agreement was in fact ‘inimical’ to the Biden-Harris Administration’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan.”
The administration's “lies” and “misrepresentations” continue, the report said.
According to the report, “The press releases were missing information regarding the Taliban's failure to abide by the Doha Agreement, the presence of terrorism in Afghanistan, the capabilities of the Afghan government and military with and without US support, and disagreements among NATO allies over US withdrawal plans.”
“The Taliban were violating key elements of the Doha Agreement, (even though) the Biden-Harris Administration claimed to be assessing the Taliban's compliance,” the report said.
“In fact, these circumstances were completely irrelevant to him.”
Ignore advice
Biden decides to withdraw completely Nearly every military official is advising against itthe document states.
“Contrary to President Biden’s public claims, our investigation revealed that the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the commander of U.S. Central Command, the secretary of state, the office of the director of national intelligence, and the commanders of NATO’s Resolute Support Mission and United States Forces-Afghanistan all recommended against withdrawing all U.S. troops from the country — both during and after the interagency review,” the report said.
The Harris-Biden administration also ignored the concerns of the international community, and ignored the objections of other NATO countries deployed in Afghanistan in support of the United States.
Even prominent figures in Afghanistan have argued against a complete US withdrawal, arguing that the landlocked country needs more time to prepare.
The report said, “General Haibatullah Alizai — a former Afghan army general — told the committee's majority staff that he had asked for more time from U.S. commanders on the ground, adding, 'Just tell your leadership to stay with us for two more years. … We are going to take the initiative … it is in our favor and we can defeat the Taliban.'”
Failure to plan
Overall, the report painted a picture of an administration that was overly focused on the political aspects of withdrawal, while lacking the foresight to plan ahead for even predictable scenarios.
A key piece of the report emphasizes that Biden did not officially order the noncombatant evacuation operation — the largest ever conducted by the US in history — until August 16, 2021, a day after Kabul fell to the Taliban and just two weeks before the last US troops left the city.
“The failure to prepare for NEO had consequences not only for Americans and allies in Afghanistan but also for U.S. personnel on the ground who were forced to evacuate desperate civilians in a hostile environment,” the report said. “Those concerns were brushed aside by the Biden-Harris administration for the sake of lip service.
“Rather than admit their negligence, U.S. service members and Foreign Service officers were instructed to prioritize evacuating as many people as possible, no matter the risk to their lives.”
Implications for Kamla
The report made little mention of Vice President Kamala Harris, a factor cited by the committee's former senior investigator, Jerry Dunleavy, in his protest resignation from the investigation.
The report emphasized, pointing to previous public reporting, “Harris was the last person in the room when President Biden decided to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan; a fact she touted shortly after President Biden issued his ‘go-to-zero’ order.”
She was one of 15 administration officials whose report recommended that Congress pass a resolution condemning the incident.
The report comes just two days before Harris' televised debate against Trump in Philadelphia.
Critics such as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg have accused the panel of timing the report’s release for political purposes.
But the panel's chairman, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), fired back on CBS's “Face the Nation” on Sunday, saying, “It took me two years to get to this point because of obstruction — I had to issue subpoenas over and over again.”
McCaul blamed Trump for a key aspect of the withdrawal — leaving the Afghan government out of negotiations on the Doha Agreement, which took place during his tenure.
Controversy
Despite the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s decision to release its detailed report on the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, its work on the matter is far from complete.
“We have a lot of unanswered questions with respect to the (Defense Department) … (about) what happened on the ground,” McCaul said.
The panel, which conducted 18 written interviews, studied more than 20,000 pages of documents and held seven public hearings to produce the scathing report, is also looking at reforms at the National Security Council and the State Department.
“Everything we’ve seen and heard about Chairman McCaul’s latest partisan report shows it is based on selective facts, inaccurate characterizations, and pre-existing biases that have plagued this investigation from the start,” said Sharon Yang, White House Under Secretary for Oversight and Investigations.
