On Afghanistan, House committee finds answers but not accountability

WASHINGTON—House Republicans want to find a way to hold the Biden administration accountable for the U.S. military’s disastrous final days in Afghanistan, but they don’t have a clear avenue to doing so.

Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wants Congress at least to vote on the matter.

“I will be introducing a resolution of condemnation, and it should be on the floor next week,” McCaul said.

Last week, the Foreign Affairs Committee released its findings after nearly two years of investigation into the withdrawal, which took place in August 2021. The investigation found that miscommunication, security failures, and a shortage of personnel led up to a suicide bombing by the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate at the Kabul airport. The attack killed over 170 people, including 13 American service members.

McCaul’s resolution will list 15 government officials named in the committee report, including President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and others.

“It’s a historic document,” McCaul said of the report. “It’s not a political document. It was a document designed to get to the truth. This was a catastrophic failure of epic proportions.”

While criticism from Republican lawmakers has focused on Biden’s insistence that the United States leave Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 2021, the 345-page report finds fault with decisions made during the withdrawal by leaders far removed from the Oval Office.

To examine just one decision, I asked Republican lawmakers who helped create the report about the actions of Ambassador Ross Wilson, the State Department’s representative in the Afghan capital of Kabul.

In the lead-up to the hastened exit, Wilson pushed to keep the U.S. Embassy located in Kabul against security warnings from the Department of Defense.

“Ambassador Wilson was identified repeatedly as someone who refused to discuss the possibility for [noncombatant emergency operations],” the Report states. “According to a State Department official, Ambassador Wilson ‘reprimanded embassy personnel during a meeting when they expressed concerns about their safety given the deteriorating security environment.’”

The report claims that the departments of Defense and the State were on different pages about the danger.

American Gens. Mark Milley and Austin Miller had communicated that the U.S. forces did not have the manpower or resources to stabilize the situation.

Wilson has defended his actions, saying he had no control over the military’s operations and keeping the embassy open wasn’t his idea.

“[President Biden] said that while the U.S. military would be leaving Afghanistan, the United States would not, and that our diplomatic work would continue,” Wilson said in a classified briefing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last October. “And Secretary Blinken reiterated this intention to me. Knowing the value of having embassies abroad and the assets they provide for protecting American interests, I agreed with that decision.” 

Wilson ultimately made the call for the State Department to withdraw. In his testimony, Wilson explained that Blinken had discussed the plans for evacuations only as a contingency. On Aug. 15, 2021, when the evacuation began, it was Wilson who reached out to Blinken to tell him the situation had become untenable.

Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., said the State Department should have never let the situation get that far.

“I think at the end of the day, this [attack] was entirely preventable. And that, to me, that is the fundamental takeaway. After Benghazi, the State Department should have learned full well,” Lawler said, referencing the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic post in Libya.

Cheryl Juels, the aunt of 23-year-old Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee who died in the suicide bombing in Kabul, wants the Biden administration to admit that something went wrong. She came to Washington last week for a Gold Star ceremony honoring the 13 fallen Americans.

“We got nothing from this administration. They just want it to just all go away,” said Juels, who has read the report. “We understand that everything was changing rapidly. But say that—say that we ‘could have done this differently,’ or, ‘next time you’ll do that.’ But they just said it was a success. That was nothing to be proud of.”

Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., is the ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. When asked about the specific conduct of Ambassador Wilson, Meeks said Wilson made the best call he could with the information available to him—even if the result had gone badly.

“We could always play Monday-morning quarterback and decide we could have ran play X as opposed to play Y, but to try to portray it as incompetent or a betrayal is not the appropriate thing to do,” Meeks said.

Even as Republicans have now more clearly articulated what went wrong in 2021, they’re not so sure about what they can do about it going forward.

“This report is the beginning of holding all of them accountable, including the ambassador, including DOD officials, and including the president and Vice President,” Lawler said.

Lawler said he believes the first and most immediate way to hold the administration accountable would be to hand Harris—and by extension, Biden—a loss at the polls on November 5. But when pressed about what kinds of accountability he envisioned for other figures who played a role in the practical execution of the withdrawal, Lawler says Republicans should wait for another administration to figure that out.

“The executive branch is going to be able to uncover a lot more information within both state and defense,” Lawler said.

Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., also sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He thinks there’s not much more Republicans can do besides considering the resolution that McCaul, the Foreign Affairs chairman, hopes to bring to the floor.

“I think there’s job firing options in the end. There’s some people still in the military, some career diplomats in there. But in the end anyone that you would impeach is gone at that point,” Mast said. “But for the families, as an example, there’s closure. What was so contrary to any level of closure for them was that every time this got brought up, the statement being that ‘this couldn’t have gone any other way,’ and it just wasn’t inevitable.”

Ambassador Wilson did not respond to requests for comment for this report.