The report, written by Republican committee chairman Michael McCaul, focuses on the alleged role played by US Vice President Kamala Harris, whose name was mentioned 251 times, according to Voice of America.
It comes 24 hours before the scheduled debate between Harris and Donald Trump on Tuesday.
The report criticized the Biden administration for “minimizing the potential consequences of the decision” to withdraw, ignoring warnings that Taliban fighters were seizing major cities in Afghanistan faster than U.S. officials had anticipated.
“Vice President Kamala Harris was the last person in the room when President Biden made the decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan—something she bragged about shortly after President Biden ordered the withdrawal,” the latest report, titled “Wilful Blindness: An Assessment of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Chaos That Followed,” states.
The front page of the report features a photo of Harris prominently displayed below Biden, and above her is a photo of Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, who played a larger role in the withdrawal.
“Despite warnings against withdrawal from senior leaders, Harris’ aide revealed that the vice president ‘strongly supported’ President Biden’s decision,” McCaul’s report continues.
Former chief of staff Ron Klain confirmed that “Vice President Harris was deeply invested in the president’s Afghanistan policy.”
In the final days of the withdrawal, an ISIS terrorist carried out a suicide attack that killed 13 American soldiers and about 170 Afghan civilians at Kabul airport.
Many Afghans who were clinging to the bottom of planes leaving Afghanistan fell to their deaths.
Former President Donald Trump had initiated the withdrawal in February 2020 by signing an agreement with the Taliban, an agreement that Biden has honored as he seeks to end America’s longest war.
This fateful withdrawal played a role in influencing Biden’s political standing.
Until then, Americans had approved in national polls of Biden’s performance during the first seven months of his presidency.
But his approval rating plummeted after the chaotic withdrawal and the deaths of the 13 soldiers, and he has not recovered to positive status since.
The report by Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee follows a three-year investigation and includes allegations that the Biden administration did not have adequate security plans or arrangements to safely carry out the withdrawal.
The committee chairman, Michael McCaul, said the Biden administration “had the information and opportunity to take the necessary steps to plan for the anticipated collapse of the Afghan government, so that we could safely evacuate American personnel, American citizens, green card holders, and our brave Afghan allies.”
Previous investigations have blamed several US administrations, including a 2023 report from the US watchdog on Afghanistan that noted that both Trump and Biden insisted on moving forward with the withdrawal despite the Taliban violating some key commitments it made in the 2020 agreement.
Rep. Gregory Meeks, the committee’s top Democrat, said in a letter to colleagues that Republicans “selectively picked witness testimony to exclude anything that was not helpful to a preconceived partisan narrative about the withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
In a lengthy statement, the US State Department said: “There are valid and important criticisms of the two-decade war in Afghanistan and how it ended.”
But she explained that she “remained focused on development and growth from that point on, learned important lessons and made sustainable changes to crisis operations.”
The State Department added that the US government successfully evacuated 120,000 Americans, Afghans, and third-country nationals from Afghanistan in the last two weeks of August 2021, and resettled 165,000 Afghans across the United States.
The department said it was “prepared to work alongside” lawmakers who have a “serious interest” in finding legislative and administrative solutions to avoid the chaos of withdrawing from the Afghan war zone.
But she said she would “not stand silent” while the ministry and its “workforce” were used to advance partisan agendas.
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