US Republicans report blames Biden admin for catastrophic Afghanistan exit

House Republicans on Sunday issued a scathing report on their investigation into the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, blaming the disastrous end of America's longest war on President Joe Biden's administration and minimising the role of former President Donald Trump, who had signed the withdrawal deal with the Taliban.

The partisan review lays out the final months of military and civilian failures, following Trump's February 2020 withdrawal deal, which allowed America's fundamentalist Taliban enemy to sweep through and conquer the entire country even before the last US officials flew out on 30 August 2021. The chaotic exit left behind many American citizens, Afghan battlefield allies, women activists, and others at risk from the Taliban.

However, the House Republicans' report breaks little new ground, as the withdrawal has been exhaustively litigated through several independent reviews.

Previous investigations and analyses have pointed to a systemic failure spanning the last four presidential administrations and concluded that Biden and Trump share the heaviest blame.

Texas Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, who led the investigation as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the GOP review reveals that the Biden administration “had the information and opportunity to take necessary steps to plan for the inevitable collapse of the Afghan government, so we could safely evacuate US personnel, American citizens, green card holders, and our brave Afghan allies.”

“At each step of the way, however, the administration picked optics over security,” he said in a statement.

America's longest war

McCaul earlier in the day denied that the timing of the report's release ahead of the presidential election was political, or that Republicans ignored Trump's mistakes in the US withdrawal.

Defending the administration after the release of the report, a State Department spokesman said that Biden acted in the US's best interest in finally ending the country's war in Afghanistan.

The spokesman, Matthew Miller, said in a statement that Republicans produced a narrative “meant only to harm the Administration, instead of seeking to actually inform Americans on how our longest war came to an end.”

House Democrats in a statement said the report by their Republican colleagues “cherry-picked witness testimony to exclude anything unhelpful to a predetermined, partisan narrative about the Afghanistan withdrawal” and ignored facts about Trump's role.

The more than 18-month investigation by Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee zeroed in on the months leading up to the removal of US troops, saying that Biden and his administration undermined high-ranking officials and ignored warnings as the Taliban seized key cities far faster than most US officials had expected or prepared for.

“I called their advance ‘the Red Blob,’” retired Col. Seth Krummrich said of the Taliban, telling the committee that at the special operations' central command where he was chief of staff, “we tracked the Taliban advance daily, looking like a red blob gobbling up terrain."

“I don't think we ever thought — you know, nobody ever talked about, ‘Well, what’s going to happen when the Taliban come over the wall?’” Carol Perez, the State Department's acting undersecretary for management at the time of the withdrawal, said of what House Republicans said was minimal State Department planning before abandoning the embassy in mid-August 2021 when the Taliban swept into Kabul, Afghanistan's capital.

Two-decade occupation

The withdrawal ended a nearly two-decade invasion and occupation by US and allied forces and began to rout out the al-Qaeda militants responsible for the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States.

The Taliban had allowed al-Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden, to shelter in Afghanistan. Committee staffers noted reports since the US withdrawal of the group rebuilding in Afghanistan, such as a UN report of up to eight al-Qaeda training camps there.

The Taliban overthrew an Afghan government and military that the US had spent nearly 20 years and trillions of dollars building in hopes of keeping the country from again becoming a base for anti-Western extremists.

A 2023 report by the US government watchdog for the US in Afghanistan singles out Trump’s February 2020 deal with the Taliban agreeing to withdraw all American forces and military contractors by the spring of the next year, and both Trump’s and Biden’s determination to keep pulling out US forces despite the Taliban breaking key commitments in the withdrawal deal.

House Republicans' more than 350-page document is the product of hours of testimony — including with former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, US Central Command retired Gen. Frank McKenzie, and others who were senior officials at the time — seven public hearings and round-tables, as well as more than 20,000 pages of State Department documents reviewed by the committees.