President Joe Biden’s two closest foreign policy advisers, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, are coming into focus as the top targets of Republican anger over the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“This is not a military failure,” Alabama Rep. Mike Rogers, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, told reporters Tuesday. “Joe Biden and Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan can’t shirk responsibility for this. What happened is their fault.”
That denunciation was part of a series of rebukes attributing the recent upheaval in Afghanistan to State Department and White House decisions rather than the U.S. intelligence community for the Pentagon. They previewed the forthcoming fight between congressional investigators and the executive branch.
“We are going to investigate this and exercise our constitutional authority of oversight to get to the bottom of how did this get so wrong?” said Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “How did this get so bad?”
BLINKEN OUTLINES PATH TO LEGITIMACY FOR TALIBAN
That outcry is a marked break from the expectations at the beginning of the administration when Sullivan and Blinken received bipartisan praise for their expertise. Biden and other administration officials argued the administration’s plans went awry as the Afghan military collapsed abruptly as the U.S. forces withdrew.
“We all thought we had more time,” a senior State Department official told reporters. “It was quite reasonable to expect that the military withdrawal … could take place in an environment that wasn’t markedly different, wasn’t categorically different from the one that we had on April 30.”
That line of thinking entailed the assessment that violence from the Taliban would increase if U.S. forces remained — in defiance of the May 1 deadline for withdrawal set by the U.S.-Taliban deal signed by former President Donald Trump’s administration last year — rather than if Biden announced a departure.
“We also knew that if we didn’t announce the withdrawal, that the environment would be categorically different,” the senior State Department official continued. “This was not just our assumption. They made very clear to us that if our forces were not on the way out, they would once again seek to engage in an offensive … Now, again, there was, I think, a widespread assumption that it would be longer — much longer, in some cases — before the Taliban was able to encroach on Kabul, and ultimately enter the city. That turned out not to be the case, of course.”
McCaul noted that Republican lawmakers have asked the Pentagon, State Department, and the intelligence community “to preserve all documents” related to the withdrawal decision for lawmakers to scrutinize — but he made clear what he thinks the investigation will show.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“This was not an intelligence failure, as the administration will tell you, as they blame everybody but themselves,” McCaul said. “This was a political decision, pure and simple.”
