WASHINGTON — President Biden has stuck to his guns and rejected any advice to the contrary, ignoring the pleas of the Afghan government and ignoring objections from U.S. allies.
That was one of the main conclusions from a more than two-year House Foreign Affairs Committee investigation into the chaotic and deadly Afghanistan withdrawal, according to a scathing report released Sunday.
“During his decades-long tenure as a Delaware senator, his eight years as Vice President of the United States, and his nearly four years as President, Biden has demonstrated a distrust of American military experts and advisors and has prioritized politics and his own personal success over America's national security interests,” the roughly 350-page report alleged.
The report said the Trump administration has consistently lied and misled Americans in an attempt to convince them to support his belief that the U.S. should quickly end the 20-year war in Afghanistan, regardless of the consequences.
Former President Donald Trump's administration had previously drafted and signed the Doha Agreement with the Afghan government and the Taliban to end the US war in Afghanistan.
But the report said Biden showed little respect for the terms of the agreement and pushed through it at all costs, later blaming the document for coercing his actions.
The Doha agreement, signed in 2020, would see the US withdraw its troops from Afghanistan if the Taliban met certain commitments.
For example, according to the report, the terrorist group is responsible for “severing ties with al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations, ceasing attacks on U.S. and coalition forces, reducing violence against Afghan forces, and initiating negotiations with the Afghan government.”
But Biden's reckless and blind decision-making led him to ignore key details of the agreement, the document said.
It's all for show
On February 4, 2021, then-State Department spokesman Ned Price announced that the United States would begin a review to assess the Taliban's compliance with the Doha Agreement to determine whether the United States should withdraw from Afghanistan sooner.
However, “in his testimony before the committee, contrary to his public statements, Price asserted that the Taliban's compliance with the Doha Agreement was in fact 'unrelated' to the Biden-Harris administration's decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan,” the document noted.
The report said the administration's “lies” and “misrepresentations” continued.
“The press release lacked information about the Taliban's non-compliance with the Doha Agreement, the continuation of terrorism in Afghanistan, the capabilities of the Afghan government and military with and without U.S. support, and NATO allies' opposition to the U.S. withdrawal plan,” according to the report.
“The Taliban have violated key provisions of the Doha Agreement. [though] The Biden-Harris administration asserted that it was assessing the Taliban's compliance,” the report said.
“In reality, the conditions were completely irrelevant to them.”
The advice was ignored
According to the document, Biden decided to proceed with the full withdrawal despite nearly all military officials being opposed to it.
“Despite President Biden's public assertions to the contrary, our investigation reveals that the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the commander of U.S. Central Command, the Secretary of State, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, NATO's Resolute Support Mission and the commander of U.S. Forces Afghanistan all recommended not withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan both during and after the interagency review,” the report said.
The Biden-Harris administration also ignored the concerns of the international community and acted over the objections of other NATO nations who had deployed to Afghanistan to support the US.
Even key Afghan figures have spoken out against a complete U.S. withdrawal, arguing that the landlocked country needs more time to prepare.
“Former Afghan general Gen. Haibatullah Alizai pleaded with the committee's majority staff for more time from U.S. commanders there, telling them, 'Tell your leadership to stay with us for two more years. … We will take the lead … It's in our favor and we can defeat the Taliban,'” the report said.
Plans fail
Overall, the report painted a picture of an administration that was so fixated on the political prospect of withdrawal that it lacked the foresight to plan ahead even for foreseeable scenarios.
A striking passage in the report highlights that President Biden formally ordered the non-combatant evacuation operation – the largest in US history – on August 16, 2021, the day after Kabul fell to the Taliban and just two weeks before the last US troops withdrew from the city.
“Failures to prepare for a NEO have impacted not only Americans and allies in Afghanistan, but also U.S. personnel on the ground who were forced to evacuate desperate civilians in a hostile environment,” the report said. “These concerns have been pushed aside by the Biden-Harris Administration in favor of appearances.”
“U.S. military personnel and diplomats were instructed not to admit fault but to prioritize evacuating as many people as possible, no matter the risk to their lives.”
Impact on Kamala
The report barely mentions Vice President Kamala Harris, which was one of the reasons the committee's former lead investigator, Jerry Dunleavy, resigned from the investigation in protest.
“Harris was the last person in the room when President Biden made the decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, and she bragged about that fact immediately after President Biden issued the go-to-zero order,” the report emphasized, citing previously published reports.
She was one of 15 administration officials whose report recommended that Congress pass a resolution condemning the fiasco.
The report's release comes just two days before Harris and Trump are due to debate in Philadelphia.
Critics, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, have accused the commission of timing the report for political purposes.
But the committee's chairman, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), fired back Sunday on CBS' “Face the Nation,” saying, “It's taken us two years to get to this point because of obstruction. I've had to issue subpoena after subpoena.”
McCaul criticized Trump for one key aspect of the withdrawal: excluding the Afghan government from the Doha agreement negotiations, which were carried out under Trump's watch.
fall out
Despite the House Foreign Affairs Committee deciding to release an extensive report on the Afghanistan withdrawal, its work on the issue is far from finished.
“we, [Department of Defense] … [about] “What happened on the scene,” McCaul said.
The committee, which conducted 18 transcribed interviews, reviewed more than 20,000 pages of documents and held seven hearings in its scathing report, also looked at reforms to the National Security Council and the State Department.
“Everything we have seen and heard about Chairman McCaul's latest partisan report indicates that it is based on cherry-picked facts, inaccurate portrayals, and the pre-existing biases that have plagued this investigation since its inception,” said Sharon Yang, the White House representative for oversight and investigations.
