Michael McCaul calls on State Department to release report on Afghanistan withdrawal
Mike Brest
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The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee demanded the State Department release the department’s review of the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The committee received the After-Action Review, dated March 2022, on April 6, though the 87-page document had “unexplained redactions,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), the chairman of the committee, said in a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken dated on Tuesday.
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“Despite having been completed for over a year, this document has yet to be shared with the American people,” he wrote. “The Department only provided this document to Congress in response to the Committee’s imminent threat of a subpoena.”
McCaul alleged that the After-Action Review “directly contradicts the White House’s recent written and oral public statements,” which was in reference to both the administration’s 12-page unclassified summary of the report that was released earlier this month as well as National Security Council coordinator John Kirby’s comments from the White House podium while taking questions about it.
The unclassified summary placed much of the blame on how the withdrawal played out on the previous administration, even though President Joe Biden chose to uphold a deal then-President Donald Trump agreed to with the Taliban regarding withdrawing forces in 2021.
Biden ultimately ordered a noncombatant emergency operation on August 14, 2021, weeks before the military was set to depart, a move the administration now believes it should’ve started sooner due to the Taliban’s stunningly effective offensive in which they swiftly overthrew the U.S.-backed government and Afghan army. The first days of the operation featured scenes of terrified Afghans storming the gates of Hamid Karzai International Airport, overwhelming U.S. forces.
Kirby, while taking questions from reporters about the document on April 6, denied there was any chaos in the evacuations, which ultimately resulted in the transportation of roughly 120,000 Afghans out of Afghanistan who feared life under the Taliban.
“And so, for all this talk of chaos, I just didn’t see it, not from my perch,” Kirby said. “At one point during the evacuation, there was an aircraft taking off full of people, Americans and Afghans alike, every 48 minutes. And not one single mission was missed. So, I’m sorry, I just won’t buy the whole argument of chaos.”
McCaul said in the letter that both Kirby’s remarks and the summary itself “blamed the failures of the withdrawal almost entirely on the Trump Administration, despite the fact that the decision to proceed with an unconditional withdrawal on April 14, 2021, was made by President Biden and control of the withdrawal’s timeline, planning, and execution rested with the Biden Administration.”
McCaul claimed that some of the findings within the document that have been declassified acknowledged Biden’s role in the collapse.
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“The decisions of both President Trump and President Biden to end the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan had serious consequences for the viability of the Afghan government and its security … the AAR team found that during both administrations there was insufficient senior-level consideration of worst case scenarios and how quickly these might follow,” it said.
He called on the department to release the already unclassified aspects of the After-Action Review immediately and an unclassified version of the entire report within 60 days. McCaul also asked for “the Afghanistan AAR files,” which were referenced in the report, and wants an unredacted copy no later than May 5.