White House gets grilling
Lawmakers attack failures in Afghanistan
WASHINGTON — A conference call between members of Congress and the Biden administration’s top diplomatic and military leaders on Afghanistan turned contentious Sunday, as lawmakers pressed the administration on how intelligence could have failed so badly and how long the military would help hold the Kabul airport.
Lawmakers said the 45-minute call with Secretary of State Antony Blinken; Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin; and Gen. Mark. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; was not particularly revelatory.
“It was, I would say, a rote exercise in telling us what we had already learned from the media and social media,” said Rep. Peter Meijer, R-Mich., and a former Army reservist who did conflict analysis in Afghanistan.
“It is overwhelmingly clear to me that this has been a cascade of failures at the Defense Department, with the intelli
gence community and within our political community,” Meijer said. “And nothing on the call gave me the confidence that even the magnitude of the failures has been comprehended.”
The pointed questioning centered on which Afghans the U.S. would get out and how.
Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., who was a State Department official in the Obama administration and a former leader of Human Rights Watch, pressed the top officials on how long the U.S. military would be able to keep the Kabul airport open to charter and commercial flights.
Commercial flights were suspended Sunday after sporadic gunfire erupted at the Kabul airport, according to two senior U.S. military officials. Evacuations continued on military flights, but the halt to commercial traffic closed off one of the last routes available for fleeing Afghans.
Lawmakers also asked whether the Afghans that Americans were trying to help leave would include more than those who worked for the embassy, interpreters for the military and others with special immigrant visas, or SIVs. The briefers assured them that they would try to help a broader group, including human rights and women’s rights activists, journalists and students of the American University of Afghanistan.
“I want to make sure we don’t pick up and leave when all the Americans and SIVs are out,” Malinowski said.
Democrats said they did emerge from the call convinced that the military would hold on to the airport for a while, even if the Taliban took full control of the government. But that is no guarantee that all Afghans who want to get out will be able to do so.
Few lawmakers were happy. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said his office had been bombarded with calls from the large Afghan population in his East Bay district because the repatriation assistance page of the State Department website included a broken link that had gotten them nowhere. Khanna was given a single point of contact at the State Department for all of his callers, but that person was soon overwhelmed.
“Maybe they ought to have a functioning link on the website with a direct way of processing all these requests,” Khanna said.
GOP CRITICIZES
Some Republican lawmakers used the Taliban’s advance to hammer Biden.
On the conference call, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican minority leader, was recognized to ask a question, then began a blistering attack on the Biden administration, saying the collapse in Afghanistan would empower China and weaken the U.S. position in the world, according to people on the call.
He put out a statement afterward saying that during the call “I only heard excuses.”
“Amidst the ongoing chaos and ensuing instability at home and abroad, the only solution President Biden has offered is to play politics and baselessly blame his predecessor,” he said.
He added, “Given that Republican members were somehow not allowed to ask questions during the call, I’ve requested the administration hold another call in the immediate future.” That request was greeted with incredulity by Democrats, given McCarthy’s lengthy attack.
He said that despite planning for this drawdown, the outcome was foreseeable, damaging America’s reputation overseas.
Lawmakers faulted U.S. policy on Afghanistan, lamenting that 20 years of U.S. involvement and bloodshed is ending with the Taliban’s re-emergence. Some said the U.S. shouldn’t have pulled out — despite a lack of public support for the war.
“As we get to the 20th anniversary of 9/11, we are surrendering Afghanistan to the terrorist organization that housed al-Qaida when they plotted and planned the attacks against us,” said Rep. Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican and member of the Armed Services Committee, on ABC’s “This Week.”
Cheney, daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, whose administration began the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, said both Biden and Trump bear responsibility.
She added: “What we’re seeing now is actually the opposite of ending the war. What we’re seeing now is a policy that will ensure, ensure, that we will, in fact, have to have our children and grandchildren continuing to fight this war at a much higher cost.”
BLINKEN DEFENDS
Blinken said Sunday that the defeat of Afghan security forces that has led to the Taliban’s takeover “happened more quickly than we anticipated,” although he maintained the Biden administration’s position that keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan was not in American interests.
“This is heart-wrenching stuff,” Blinken said in an interview on CNN after a night that saw the Taliban enter the Afghan capital, Kabul, and the shuttering of the U.S. Embassy as the last remaining American diplomats in Afghanistan were moved to a facility at the city’s airport for better protection.
Blinken stopped short of saying that all American diplomats would return to the U.S., repeating an intent to maintain a small core of officials in Kabul.
But he forcefully defended the administration’s decision to withdraw the military from Afghanistan after 20 years of war, saying it could have been vulnerable to Taliban attacks had the U.S. reneged on an agreement brokered under then-President Donald Trump for all foreign forces to leave the country.
“We would have been back at war with the Taliban,” Blinken said, calling that “something the American people simply can’t support — that is the reality.”
He said it was not in U.S. interests to devote more time, money and, potentially, casualties, to Afghanistan at a time that the U.S. was also facing long-term strategic challenges from China and Russia. But, Blinken said, U.S. forces will remain in the region to confront any terrorist threat against the U.S. at home that might arise from Afghanistan.
He also appeared to demand more conditions for the prospect of recognizing the Taliban as a legitimate government or establishing a formal diplomatic relationship with them.
Earlier, the Biden administration had said the Taliban, in order to acquire international financial support, must never allow terrorists to use Afghanistan as a haven, must not take Kabul by force and must not attack Americans.
Sunday, Blinken said the Taliban must also uphold basic rights of citizens, particularly women who gained new freedoms to go to work and school after the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001.
There will be no recognition of a Taliban government “if they’re not sustaining the basic rights of the Afghan people, and if they revert to supporting or harboring terrorists who might strike us,” the secretary of state said.
Blinken’s comments were criticized by the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas.
“This is going to be a stain on this president and his presidency,” McCaul said. “It’s going to be worse than Saigon,” he said, referring to the hasty evacuation of the U.S. Embassy that marked America’s defeat in Vietnam.
“They totally blew this one,” McCaul said. “They completely underestimated the strength of the Taliban.”
“I hate to say this: I hope we don’t have to go back there,” he said. “But it will be a threat to the homeland in a matter of time.”
QUESTIONS PERSIST
The hurried evacuation raised alarm in Congress that the country would quickly become a threat to U.S. national security.
In briefings with members of the U.S. House and Senate on Sunday, Biden’s top diplomatic and military officials faced criticism and questions about the effects of President Joe Biden’s decision to continue withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.
Administration officials briefed members of the House and Senate by phone on Sunday, defending the Biden administration’s approach.
Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, described the Taliban’s takeover as heartbreaking and asked administration officials what it would have taken to remain in Afghanistan, according to two people familiar with the call.
Defense Secretary Austin responded that the Taliban would have launched attacks on U.S. troops, requiring a substantial increase in American forces.
Biden, vacationing at the presidential retreat of Camp David, met by video conference with his national security team to discuss the drawdown in civilian personnel in Afghanistan, the White House said.
Biden said in a statement on Saturday that continued U.S. military presence “would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country.” He said the U.S. had spent nearly $1 trillion in Afghanistan, trained over 30,000 Afghan soldiers and police and provided military equipment. He said an “endless American presence” in the civil war was “not acceptable to me.”
Ultimately, an end to the U.S. military’s involvement in Afghanistan may prove to be more popular to a war-weary country than the weekend’s chaos proves to be a liability.
Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz. and a Marine Corps veteran of Iraq, wrote on Twitter: “What I am feeling and thinking about the situation in Afghanistan, I can never fit on Twitter. But one thing that is definitely sticking out is that I haven’t gotten one constituent call about it. And my district has a large Veteran population.”