House Republicans are preparing to release an investigative report blaming the Biden administration for what they called the failures of the chaotic and deadly U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, laying out a scathing indictment that appeared timed to tarnish Vice President Kamala Harris in the final weeks before the presidential election.
The roughly 250-page document set to be released on Monday is the product of a years-long inquiry by Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It accuses President Biden and his national security team of being so determined to pull out of Afghanistan that they flouted security warnings, refused to plan for an evacuation and lied to the American public throughout the withdrawal about the risks on the ground and missteps that led to the deaths of 13 U.S. service members.
“The Biden-Harris administration prioritized the optics of the withdrawal over the security of U.S. personnel on the ground,” the report states. The document, a draft of which was reviewed by The New York Times, also contends that the administration’s mismanagement resulted in “exposing U.S. Defense Department and State Department personnel to lethal threats and emotional harm.”
Details of the document were reported earlier on Sunday by CBS.
The findings are largely a recitation of familiar lines of criticism against Biden, offering few new insights about what might have been done differently to avoid the Taliban’s swift march into Kabul and the disastrous U.S. evacuation operation in August 2021. But they come at a critical time in the presidential race, when Trump has been working to persuade voters that Ms. Harris is unfit to be the commander in chief.
The authors single out Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, for particular condemnation, charging that he failed to coordinate a viable exit strategy and misrepresented the situation on the ground to the public.
They absolve former President Donald J. Trump almost entirely of responsibility for the debacle, even though an inspector general found in 2022 that the deal his administration struck with the Taliban in 2020, known as the Doha Agreement, to orchestrate a rapid U.S. withdrawal, was a major factor in the crisis.
The report instead faults Zalmay Khalilzad, then the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation, for the shortcomings of that pact.
