(NewsNation) — During a hearing in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken pushed back on criticism about the 2021 withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.
The committee says the hearing is a culmination of three years of investigations.
Lawmakers have been demanding answers about the chaotic evacuation, including when thirteen U.S. service members and 170 Afghans died in a suicide bombing at the Abbey Gate entrance of Hamid Karzai International Airport.
Asked by House Foreign Affairs Chair Michael McCaul, R-Texas, about who was in charge of the evacuation, Blinken said he was in charge of the State Department.
“The government, the (Biden) administration, was in charge of the evacuation,” Blinken answered. “Specifically, the State Department and the Department of Defense…on any (Non-combatant evacuation operation) worked closely together, with clearly assigned responsibilities.”
Blinken was asked to testify before the committee several times before doing so Wednesday. Republican representatives tried earlier this year to hold him in contempt of Congress for not complying with a subpoena to appear.
“I’ve been disappointed that you’ve ignored my requests for my testimony, forcing me to subpoena you not once, but twice,” McCaul said at the hearing Wednesday.
The State Department, meanwhile, has said they have provided Foreign Affairs committee members with large amounts of information and that Blinken has testified before Congress on Afghanistan more than 14 times.
A report by GOP representatives on the Foreign Affairs Committee was released in September, accusing the Biden administration of failing to see warning signs about how quickly Kabul would fall to the Taliban, as well as delaying an evacuation, NewsNation’s partner The Hill reported.
White House officials, in response, said the report cherry-picked details and didn’t place enough blame on President-elect Donald Trump, who began the withdrawal process by signing a deal with Afghanistan’s militant Islamist Taliban in 2020. Similarly, some Democratic lawmakers, as well as Blinken, on Wednesday defended the Biden administration’s response by blaming Trump.
The reason the withdrawal happened when it did, Democrats said, was because Trump’s administration negotiated a certain date for when troops would leave Afghanistan with the Taliban, leaving Biden with little wiggle room.
“President (Joe) Biden faced a choice it was between ending the war or escalating it,” Blinken said. “Had he not followed through on his predecessor’s commitment, attacks on our forces and allies would have resumed, and the Taliban’s assault on the country’s major cities would have commenced.”
Republicans, on the other hand, argued that the Taliban wasn’t even following that agreement, so Biden didn’t need to adhere to it either.
The Taliban overtook Kabul only days into the evacuation from Afghanistan, and an estimated 100,000 partners of U.S. government efforts were left behind, The Hill reported.
“Even with the warning bells sounding loudly, ringing loudly, you denied the imminent and dangerous threats to American interests, American citizens and our decade-long Afghan partners,” McCaul said to Blinken Wednesday. “All the while, the Taliban captured province after province on their march to Kabul.”
Blinken maintained that “no one anticipated” that Afghanistan’s armed forces “would collapse as quickly as they did.”
Today, every United States citizen who told the State Department they wanted to leave during the evacuation “has now had the opportunity to do so,” Blinken told legislators.
“To those Americans who have entered the country since August 2021: we will not rest until we bring you home,” Blinken said.
Democratic Rep. Gregory Meeks, the committee’s ranking member, commended Blinken for being the first cabinet official to testify to the House immediately after the events of the withdrawal.
Meeks called the Republican members’ report “partisan and misleading.”
It “distorts the facts received in their own investigation from 16 State Department witnesses and thousands of pages of documents,” Meek said.
McCaul questioned Blinken on whether Russia’s invasion of Ukraine happened partly because of the Afghan withdrawal, as the former country sensed weakness.
To that, Blinken said, “Absolutely not.”
“Russia would’ve been delighted for us to have continued to be bogged down in Afghanistan for another 20 years,” Blinken said.
Reuters contributed to this report.
