WASHINGTON (Middle East Eye) – House Republicans have issued a scathing rebuke of U.S. President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan last August, saying in a new report that the administration repeatedly failed to prepare for the aftermath of the evacuation and engaged the issue with an “utter lack of urgency”.
The leading Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael McCaul, published a 114-page interim report on the withdrawal, in which he outlined multiple flaws in the way in which the withdrawal was conducted.
“This interim report proves much of the deadly chaos during the evacuation from Afghanistan could have been prevented if the State Department and [National Security Council] had properly prepared for the expected fallout from President Biden’s decision,” to withdraw from the country, McCaul said in a statement about the report, which was shared with Middle East Eye.
In April 2021, Biden announced that the United States would be leaving Afghanistan, and in August the U.S. fully withdrew from Afghanistan in a weeks-long evacuation that is largely remembered for the chaos in Kabul, when tens of thousands of Afghans tried to secure passage out of the country alongside American forces.
The Taliban, which had been fighting against the U.S. and the Washington-backed Afghan government, had quickly taken over most of the country that year. And by the time of the U.S. withdrawal, the Afghan government had fully collapsed and Taliban forces entered the capital city of Kabul.
“In the four months from when President Biden announced his plan to unconditionally withdraw until the fall of Kabul, the committee minority has found the State Department took very few substantive steps [to] prepare for the consequences that were expected,” said the report.
McCaul’s 114-page report highlighted many concerns with the withdrawal, including a lack of consular presence on the ground and rejecting offers from other countries including Pakistan to aid in evacuations which the congressman said delayed the process of getting Americans and Afghans out of the country.
“At the height of the evacuation, only 36 U.S. consular officers were on the ground in Kabul, despite needing to process more than one hundred thousand evacuees,” the report said.
“Following the evacuation debacle, the committee minority believes America’s standing in the world has been degraded, the U.S. is less safe than it was before, and those Afghans most at-risk of Taliban reprisals remain trapped in Afghanistan.”