Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified about the military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan on Capitol Hill in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee and Senate Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday.
The two Biden administration officials told lawmakers behind closed doors about the “real challenges in Afghanistan even though our troop presence is gone,” ranking member Jim Inhofe said in a statement.
Those challenges include identifying and helping Americans who were left behind in Afghanistan amid the chaotic withdrawal at the end of August as well as the “efforts to bring justice to those who planned” the Aug. 26 suicide bombing.
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The top Republican found their “overall testimony” to be “lacking,” and said considering the briefing was classified, he “would have liked to hear more details regarding the interagency planning process, nature of the terrorist threat in Afghanistan today, and their counterterrorism plans going forward.”
Sen. Jim Risch, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, released a harsher version of events, claiming that the secretaries’ “answers [glossed] over the mistakes that were made and the lessons that needed to be learned.”
A spokesperson for the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Washington Examiner earlier this month that ISIS-K, the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan, or al Qaeda could gain the capacity to launch international attacks in a matter of months with the Taliban having assumed control of the government back in mid-August just weeks before the United States’s departure. Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in September that the two groups could reconstitute within six to 36 months, which would occur as soon as this spring.
Risch also said the military’s planned reliance on an over-the-horizon counterterrorism strategy, which would mean airstrikes without a physical presence in the country to feed real-time intel, “only raises more questions about how they are protecting U.S. interests and citizens.”
Both Austin and Blinken agreed to another public hearing on Afghanistan, according to the Republican duo. The Office of the Secretary of Defense directed the Washington Examiner to “Congress” when asked about the reported agreement for a public hearing.
The Aug. 26 ISIS-K bombing became a defining moment for the withdrawal that concluded a two-decades-long presence in Afghanistan.
An ISIS-K operative, Abdul Rehman al Loghri, who was previously held at Bagram Airfield but was subsequently released when the Taliban overthrew the Ghani government, detonated a suicide device at the gates of Hamid Karzai International Airport, where the U.S. and allies were evacuating at-risk Afghans.
The U.S. and allies were able to evacuate more than 120,000 people in August, with the overwhelming majority coming in the final half of the month, though they still left Americans and allies behind.
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Days after the bombing, the U.S. launched an airstrike they believed would prevent an imminent terror attack on the airport, though they later acknowledged targeting a civilian aid worker who they thought posed a risk to the evacuation. The target, Zemari Ahmadi, was killed along with nine other civilians, his children among them.
The remaining members of his family are still in Afghanistan, though they are seeking to come to the U.S., and they have Austin’s support for relocation. No military personnel faced legal or professional consequences as a result of the botched strike.
