by Frank Holmes, reporter
The Biden administration completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan exactly one year ago this week—and congressional Republicans are still busy counting up the people killed, abandoned, or stranded by his lies.
It turns out the Biden administration lied about the number of Americans left behind enemy lines—by about 900 percent. And many of the Afghan allies he hung out to dry took their knowledge—and our weapons—to Iran, or they may be negotiating to turn them over to China.
Many of the details are in a 115-page interim report released by the Republican members of the House Armed Services Committee on Monday, the anniversary of the withdrawal.
With one year’s hindsight, Congressman Michael McCaul, R-T.X., called Biden’s handling of the withdrawal “an unmitigated disaster of epic proportions.”
“There was no plan,” he said.
Thanks to Biden’s poorly executed withdrawal, Afghanistan has now reverted “to a pre-9/11 state” and become “a breeding ground for terrorism.” Under the leadership of the Taliban, McCaul told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday, the nation “will be a threat to the (U.S.) homeland in a matter of time.”
“This is going to be a stain on this president and this presidency,” said McCaul, (a military veteran). “I think he is going to have blood on his hands for what they did.”
With the completion of his report on the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul, says there were "many sins."
"There was a complete lack and a failure to plan…There were so many mistakes." pic.twitter.com/8OtdhEEajR
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) August 14, 2022
Of course, the president and his party don’t agree. Biden called the evacuation an “extraordinary success.”
The report guts that idea. America basically relied on the Taliban to keep the Kabul airport secure during the waning days of our nation’s 20-year military occupation—and outsourcing U.S. security to Muslim fundamentalists led to a suicide bombing that killed 13 American soldiers and more than 200 Afghan civilians. Biden didn’t take that lying down: He responded with a drone attack—that killed 10 more innocent civilians.
Of course, President Biden also called this summer’s killing of al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, a great triumph…even though the terrorist mastermind was living in the capital of Afghanistan, apparently with the knowledge of the Taliban.
One of the report’s most damning estimates is the number of people left behind: “At the end of last August, Anthony Blinken announced that the total of those left in Afghanistan was 100 individuals. Officials peg the number today of those taken out since that August deadline to be around 800, with the total likely over 1,000, taking into account those airlifted by the private enterprises,” wrote Brad Slager at RedState.com. “This goes far to extend the level of incompetence exhibited in this withdrawal effort, as now we are seeing the possibility the administration only acknowledged about 10 percent of those actually left behind.”
The Biden administration also left behind an estimated $7 billion in U.S. equipment, which immediately fell into the hands of the Taliban.
…Well, most of it did. Some of it landed in Iran.
“A ‘significant’ number of Afghan special forces and about 3,000 Afghan security forces, including high ranking officers, crossed the border into Iran,” the report reveals. “Some brought military equipment and vehicles with them. We believe this happened because they were not evacuated by the U.S. or our allies, and therefore had no other option.”
In other words, the Biden administration abandoned them, and they immediately sprang across the border to Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
That’s terrible news, because these forces got their combat training from the U.S. military. “The recruitment of former Afghan military and intelligence personnel poses a major national security risk due to the fact these Afghan personnel know the U.S. military and intelligence community’s tactics, techniques, and procedures,” the report notes.
Rep. Michael Waltz, R., F.L., who is also a veteran, said since “these commandos are trained, highly trained, on how we do signals intelligence, how we do human intelligence, how we operate,” Kabul’s terrorist-aligned Taliban leaders “are hunting them down. They are seeking to force them through coercion to hand over that information so that they can use it.”
Russia and China would like to get their hands on that information—and those former U.S. allies—as well.
So far, the president and his allies have done little to push back on the report, although an official memo called it a “partisan” document filled with “cherry-picked” information. A few spokespeople tried to blame the withdrawal on a plan negotiated by President Donald Trump, the Doha Agreement—but the report refutes that charge.
“The 2020 Doha Agreement negotiated by the former administration was predicated on conditions by the Taliban that were not being met – specifically cutting their close ties to terrorist entities like al Qaeda,” the report points out. “In addition, President Biden has since admitted he would have withdrawn even without the Doha Agreement.”
Besides, critics say, Biden dismissed every other Trump policy. Why keep this one?
The Washington Post called the report “an apparent blueprint for a deeper investigation of the president and his top advisers should the GOP win the House majority in November’s midterm elections”—a fact Republican leaders in both chambers of Congress readily admit.
“The American people demand accountability,” said Senator Rick Scott, R-F.L., who’s heading up Republican efforts to take back the Senate this fall.
“Republicans demand answers—and we will get them,” promised Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the odds-on favorite to become Speaker of the House if Republicans push the Democrats out of the majority less than three months from now.
Republicans have to be careful to get to the bottom of this mishandled, murderous mission without giving the impression they want to take America back into a war that the vast majority of voters—of all parties—are glad we finally left.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”