Republicans are amplifying their demands three months before November’s midterm elections for President Joe Biden and his administration to be transparent over the deadly Afghanistan withdrawal one year after the Taliban toppled the U.S.-supported government following two decades of war.
Republican criticism seeks, in part, to harden public opinion against Biden’s handling of the withdrawal, which has become a defining moment of his presidency and precipitated a drop in his job approval, before this election cycle.
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The Biden administration has to be transparent about Afghanistan not only because the public deserves the truth, but “our soldiers need to know what went wrong so it doesn’t happen again,” according to Vandenberg Coalition Executive Director Carrie Filipetti, a former senior policy adviser to onetime U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.
“This is one of the most egregious failures of American foreign policy in the last few decades,” Filipetti told the Washington Examiner. “We do need to have something that can explain, at the very minimum, why it was that the first National Security Council meeting on a withdrawal was held the day before Kabul fell or why we left millions of dollars worth of equipment unsecured.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters this month she did not have an update regarding the Afghanistan withdrawal after-action reviews promised last year by national security adviser Jake Sullivan. The scope of the reviews is expected to cover the mass evacuation process to the special immigrant visa program, both plagued by uncertainty despite the settled peace deal deadlines.
“Once those internal reviews are done, we will have an opportunity to look at the full picture,” she said hours before Biden confirmed the CIA killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri in a downtown Kabul precision drone strike. “Department and agencies will share lessons learned consistent with operational and classification security.”
The administration’s reviews complement the congressionally mandated, but independent, nonpartisan Afghanistan War Commission report, in addition to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and outside investigations from organizations such as the World Bank. The commission’s initial findings are due in April 2023, with the final iteration in 2025.
Balancing the competing priorities of producing thorough reviews within a reasonable time is hard, but delays exacerbate existing Afghanistan frustrations and questions of competence, according to Filipetti, who cited Dakota Halverson’s suicide this weekend in California near a memorial for his brother, Marine Corp Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui, who died in the Islamic State-Khorasan Province Hamid Karzai International Airport terrorist attack, as one instance of a practical consequence.
For Anthony Cordesman, Center for Strategic and International Studies emeritus strategy chairman, a lack of domestic transparency has long been an aspect of foreign war and is not necessarily “political in character,” even in the context of Afghanistan.
“As the Taliban gained influence and power in the country, and as we failed to reform the government, there was a tendency almost to deny how difficult things were becoming,” the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council, the State Department, and the Department of Energy alumnus said.
Cordesman also contended the withdrawal would have been “kind of a mess” regardless of who was president and that there was some credence to the belief an “accelerated planned” evacuation could have “triggered the collapse” when “people were hoping there would be more negotiating time.”
“We need to challenge ourselves as much as possible,” he said. “The problem with those challenges is that, given an event in November, it’s going to be impossible to distinguish, at least initially, real lessons from partisan arguments.”
Another repercussion of drawing out the Afghanistan reviews is it permits Russia and China to interpret the lessons to be learned for themselves, Filipetti added. For example, critics attribute domestic politics against so-called forever wars to imbuing Russian President Vladimir Putin with the belief the United States would not respond if he invaded Ukraine.
Republicans are pushing a House GOP Foreign Affairs Committee Afghanistan report this week, especially its insistence that more than 800 Americans remained in Afghanistan after the Aug. 31 deadline when the administration estimated it was between 100 and 200.
“One year ago today, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul was evacuated, al Qaeda terrorists were freed from the prison at Bagram Air Base, and the Afghan capital fell to the Taliban,” Republican National Committee spokesman Jake Schneider said. “Joe Biden blamed everyone but himself for his botched Afghanistan withdrawal. One year later, it’s far past the time for accountability.”
NSC spokeswoman Adrienne Watson has slammed the report for being “riddled with inaccurate characterizations, cherry-picked information, and false claims.”
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“Former President Trump’s 2020 agreement with the Taliban empowered the Taliban, weakened our partners in the Afghan government, and committed to withdrawing our troops a few months after President Biden’s inauguration — with no clear plan for what should come next,” Watson wrote. “No preparations had been made to begin evacuating our Afghan allies.”
