No military general, Department of Defense official, or presidential adviser has been fired following last year’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the first anniversary of which just passed.
The withdrawal concluded the country’s longest war. It was punctuated with the last service members leaving an Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban, just like when they arrived in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack, and the largest emergency evacuation operation the military has ever conducted, though tens of thousands were left behind.
“Nobody’s head has rolled for this yet,” the father of the late Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Jared M. Schmitz told the Washington Examiner in an interview.
Mark Schmitz — whose son was among the 13 U.S. service members who were killed on Aug. 26, 2021, at the gates of Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, when a suicide bomber killed nearly 200 people — remains angry at leaders in Washington, D.C., whom he blames for his son’s death.
“The administration, as a whole, has been another embarrassment that only adds to the pain that we already have from just losing our kids because of incompetence. This should have never happened, as people have mentioned,” he said. “As I am seeing in a lot of other things that are going on in this administration right now, it seems to be a common theme. No accountability and they’re above the law.”
Schmitz’s frustration with the administration and defense officials for a lack of accountability for the chaotic and deadly withdrawal is not uncommon, as the country relives the collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government and revival of a Taliban regime, which occurred this time last year.
Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Jared M. Schmitz 1.jpeg
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) told the Washington Examiner he hadn’t seen any real level of accountability, though he said the entirety of the 20-year war should be examined, not just the hasty exit.
“Proper accounting has to look back at the entire history of this war,” the Massachusetts lawmaker said in an interview. “I was properly critical of the administration for the way they conducted the withdrawal. But, of course, the administration found itself in that position due to Trump’s negotiations with the Taliban a few years before. So, we really do have to look at the entire history of this war and have an accounting for all the mistakes that were made all over time to ensure that doesn’t happen again.”
Moulton was not the only lawmaker to reference congressional oversight as the pathway to accountability and lessons learned from the longest war in U.S. history. The type of accounting that Moulton seeks could come after November, should the House flip into GOP control, noted Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.
“Obviously, if Congress changes hands this November, the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Intelligence Committee, and the Armed Services Committee will be turning to real oversight of the administration and the debacle of the hasty withdrawal of Afghanistan and the current status of Afghanistan,” Turner said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “And we’ll be doing so with full authority to demand their compliance with requests for documents, data, and information.”
In addition to Congress, the special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction, or SIGAR, has been tasked for years with providing oversight to the United States’s mission in Afghanistan, but they accused the State Department and Agency for International Development, or USAID, in June of failing to cooperate with their ongoing requests for information.
“The administration has thwarted any ability on [SIGAR’s] part to review information, to receive information. They’ve stonewalled them,” Turner added. “Many of us in Congress have demanded the administration comply with SIGAR requests, and they are not. It’s unprecedented for an administration to so completely thwart the work of an inspector general.”
afghanistan withdrawal timeline
While the administration anticipated a smoother final month in which President Ashraf Ghani maintained power during the withdrawal, the U.S.-backed government was overthrown by the Taliban in less than two weeks, which prompted a mass evacuation effort of more than 100,000 people who were afraid to live under the new regime, while thousands of others were left behind.
The administration’s biggest concerns became a reality on Aug. 26, when Abdul Rehman al Loghri, who had been held at the Parwan prison at Bagram Air Base until the Taliban let prisoners go after they took control of the facility, detonated a device that Gen. Frank McKenzie, the then-head of Central Command, said had a “disturbing lethality.”
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Nearly 60 U.S. service members were killed or wounded in the Aug. 26 bombing at the airport’s Abbey Gate, while the civilian death toll was around 170 lives.
US Afghanistan Explainer
Three days after the bombing, amid fears of additional attacks, the U.S. called in a drone strike to target an individual whom they believed to be an imminent threat to U.S. service members at the Kabul airport. In its aftermath, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called it a “righteous strike,” but that was before a DOD investigation confirmed that the target was actually an Afghan aid worker, Zemari Ahmadi, who posed no threat at all to U.S. troops. Ahmadi, two adults, and seven children, some of whom were his own, died in the strike.
Air Force Inspector General Lt. Gen. Sami Said investigated the deadly strike and concluded there were no illegalities. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin signed off on his conclusions, while then-Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby announced on Dec. 13 that no military personnel would be punished for the botched strike.
