Blinken defends U.S. withdrawal actions

Secretary of state testifies before hostile members of Congress.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday defended the Biden administration’s much-criticized handling of the military withdrawal from Afghanistan in a contentious congressional hearing.

Appearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Blinken faced complaints from angry lawmakers about the administration’s response to the quick collapse of the Afghan government and, more specifically, the State Department’s actions.

Republicans called the response “a disaster” and “a disgrace” while even Democrats allowed that the entire operation could have been handled better.

The State Department has come under heavy criticism from both sides for not doing enough and not acting quickly enough to get American citizens, legal residents and at-risk Afghans out of the country after the Taliban took control of Kabul on Aug. 15. Some seeking to leave remain there, although Blinken could not provide a number.

“This was an unmitigated disaster of epic proportions,” said Rep. Michael Mccaul of Texas, the top Republican on the committee. He said the abrupt withdrawal along with leaving some Americans and Afghans behind had “emboldened the Taliban” and other U.S. adversaries. “I can summarize this in one word: betrayal.”

The chairman of the committee, New York Rep. Gregory Meeks, urged his colleagues to keep politics out of their criticism. But he acknowledged that there had been problems. “Could things have been done differently? Absolutely,” he said.

In the first of two days of congressional testimony, Blinken tried to calmly deflect allegations of unpreparedness by noting that the Biden administration had inherited a U.s.-taliban peace deal from its predecessor, along with a languishing program to grant visas to Afghans who had worked for the U.S. government.

Blinken, who had publicly predicted in June that a complete Taliban takeover would not happen “from a Friday to a Monday,” also tried to pre-empt criticism of the prediction by noting that no one in the U.S. government expected the Afghan government to fall as quickly as it did.

“The evacuation was an extraordinary effort — under the most difficult conditions imaginable — by our diplomats, military, and intelligence professionals,” he said. “In the end, we completed one of the biggest airlifts in history, with 124,000 people evacuated to safety.”

JACQUELYN MARTIN/AP FILE Secretary of State Antony Blinken told members of Congress that the evacuation from Afghanistan was “an extraordinary effort.”