A bipartisan panel tasked with assessing U.S. policy in Afghanistan is taking shape along a timeline that could spare President Joe Biden a preelection reckoning.
“It’s all been slow to get rolling,” a senior GOP aide close to the process told the Washington Examiner. “They haven’t done a lot of work yet. The Afghanistan commission is four years long. A final report isn’t due until 3 1/2 years from now. … It’s just been slow to get started.”
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That creaking start reflects the pace of Congress and the various difficulties that arise when assembling a qualified panel for such an extensive project. The Afghanistan War Commission’s mandate, which encompasses the 20 years of America’s longest war, has negated some of the value of the panel for Republicans still fuming about the missteps that led to the chaos and tragedy that marked the U.S. evacuation from Kabul last August.
“It dilutes the amount of time you have to focus on the actual withdrawal when you’re looking at the entire war,” Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) told the Washington Examiner. “So, this to me is the classic Washington playbook: ‘Let’s have a commission look at a lot of things. Look at the entire scope of it rather than focus on the withdrawal. And let’s have it be due after the next election.’”
Waltz said he hopes that Republicans will launch a special investigation of the withdrawal after the midterm elections, which even Democrats expect will produce a GOP House majority. This effort, he has argued to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), must have jurisdiction over the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence community.
“It could be joint subcommittees or it could be a select committee,” Waltz said. “But it definitely must have oversight over all of those agencies.”
Congress established the commission through the National Defense Authorization Act, which passed into law last December. Tucked within a must-pass bill in an evenly divided Senate, this relatively obscure provision couldn’t make it to Biden’s desk without the approval of his congressional defenders.
“The war in Afghanistan was shaped by four different administrations and 11 different Congresses,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) said during a Senate hearing a month after the withdrawal. “No party should be looking to score cheap, partisan political points off a multidecade nation-building failure that was bipartisan in the making.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin hailed her emphasis on decisions that predated his tenure, which offered a reprieve from the grilling underway in the hearing. “Foremost among those decisions is the Doha agreement,” Austin said, referring to the landmark U.S.-Taliban peace deal brokered during Donald Trump’s presidency. “I think that that severely impacted the morale of the [Afghan] military.”
The commission has been billed as nonpartisan in addition to comprehensive. The top Democrats and Republicans on the six relevant House and Senate committees each appointed one commissioner. The law creates a spot for a 13th commissioner appointed by Biden, which could give Democrats a slight edge in a historical review that will grow tenser as it approaches key decisions made by Trump and Biden.
“Everybody sees that it’s coming,” the senior Republican aide said.
In the meantime, both sides have previewed that clash in their own rapid-fire reviews. A recent report produced by the House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans revealed that former State Department special representative Zalmay Khalilzad, the point man for the Taliban peace talks, rebuked the Biden team for claiming that its hands were tied by the withdrawal deal he negotiated under Trump.
“It’s a cop-out,” Khalilzad, whom Secretary of State Antony Blinken retained as lead envoy for the Taliban talks during those critical months, said in the report. “They could have put additional demands.”
Blinken’s team, on the other hand, has hinted that the administration’s various “after-action reports” will take aim at Khalilzad’s handiwork.
“This is a very long story that starts with whether or not the Taliban ever intended to have a power-sharing deal of the kind that the previous administration thought was possible and encouraged,” State Department Undersecretary Victoria Nuland said during a recent appearance at the Aspen Security Forum. “If you believe that they were never sincere in that, then you have to ask what they were doing four years ago.”
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The commission might adjudicate between those positions eventually, but its nonpartisan judgments won’t be finalized until the winter of 2024-25.
“The purpose of the commission was to get Afghanistan out of the headlines,” a second senior Republican aide said. “It removes the urgency of doing anything about it now. It also will never hold anyone in this administration accountable because, by the time the report’s out, they’ll probably have left government.”
