The Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday tore into the White House for dismissing notions that America's pullout from Afghanistan was chaotic, and for trying to shift blame to the Trump administration for fostering unfavorable conditions for a withdrawal.
The senior Republican, Michael McCaul, R-Texas, is, through his committee, probing the Biden-led military withdrawal two years ago. In a statement, as reported by The Hill, McCaul slammed John Kirby, a White House spokesperson on national security issues, over earlier comments on the fraught matter.
"John Kirby's comments during today's White House press briefing were disgraceful and insulting," McCaul's statement said. "President Biden made the decision to withdraw and even picked the exact date; he is responsible for the massive failures in planning and execution."
Kirby's disputed comments came earlier Thursday, not long after the Pentagon and State Department provided Congress with classified reviews of the decision-making process around the withdrawal.
An outline from the Biden White House sought to assign blame for the challenging withdrawal to Trump's administration, even as it said there were lessons for all to glean and apply to future such missions.
McCaul, who is leading a congressional delegation to Taiwan, said he is looking forward to reviewing the Afghanistan report. He also urged further releases of classified material to help round out the picture of a withdrawal he and other critics have bluntly termed a "disaster."
The August 2021 withdrawal has, as The Hill noted, drawn intense criticism from Republicans. Among the incidents cited as proof of the mission's chaos is a suicide bombing at Kabul airport — the Islamic State at Abbey Gate took responsibility — that killed 13 U.S. troops and 170 Afghans as the pullout was winding down.
Further, an array of photos from the evacuation show planes hurriedly departing while citizens chased it and even clung to the landing gear wheels.
And many critics, including Trump himself, have derided the Biden administration for a hasty retreat that resulted in a trove of military hardware being left behind for the Taliban.
Writing from his Truth Social network on the anniversary of the United States' withdrawal last August, Trump said the Biden administration should have pulled all of the United States' resources from the region before the military left.
"No resignations or firings for the disastrous manner in which we surrendered in Afghanistan," Trump wrote. "The military should have left last, when everything else was done and accounted for — NOT FIRST. Perhaps the most embarrassing and demeaning moment in our Country's history!"
Kirby's comments
For his part, Kirby stirred the ire of McCaul and others when he said that Biden takes responsibility for the operation as commander-in-chief, but also took issue with reporters who tried to characterize the withdrawal as scattered and sloppily handled.
"At one point during the evacuation there was an aircraft taking off full of people, Americans and Afghans alike, every 48 minutes," Kirby said, according to reports. "And not one single mission was missed. So, I'm sorry, I just don't buy the whole argument of chaos. It was tough in the first few hours, you would expect it to be."
Kirby conceded the pullout may not have been perfect, but also said much of it went right, to the benefit of troops and Afghanistan. He further suggested actions by Trump created challenges for the operation that the Biden administration had to navigate.
"He didn't negotiate with the Taliban," Kirby said, referencing Biden and attempting to characterize those hurdles. "He didn't invite the Taliban to Camp David. He didn't release 5,000 prisoners. He didn't reduce force levels in Afghanistan to 2,500, and he didn't have an arrangement with the Taliban that they wouldn't attack our troops."
Biden, he said, "came in with a certain set of circumstances he had no ability to change; he had to deal with it based on what he inherited."
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