Next Monday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee will release its long-awaited report on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Three years in the making, the report will examine the issue from a military, diplomatic, and intelligence point of view.
The report has already been written. But House Republicans are giving the rollout of the report the star treatment, subpoenaing Secretary of State Antony Blinken to testify on the botched withdrawal on Sept. 19.
“You served as the final decision maker for the department on the withdrawal and evacuation,” Rep. Mike McCaul wrote in the letter, demanding that Mr. Blinken appear before the panel. McCaul is the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Blinken would not be available on that date and criticized the committee’s refusal to accept what he called “reasonable alternatives to comply with Chairman McCaul’s request for a public hearing.”
“It is disappointing that instead of continuing to engage with the department in good faith, the committee instead has issued yet another unnecessary subpoena,” Mr. Miller wrote. He claims that Blinken has testified before Congress 14 times (!), four times before the Foreign Relations Committee.
Begging your pardon, sir, but testifying before Congress is Blinken's fricking job. And considering the subject matter, he hasn't testified half enough about the Afghan withdrawal.
The issue has come to the fore once again as Democrats are making a huge deal about Trump's appearance at Arlington National Cemetary at the request of the families of soldiers killed during the botched withdrawal.
“It will serve as an indictment on the administration’s reckless refusal to properly prepare for the withdrawal,” Mr. McCaul said in a statement last week announcing the release of the report. “President Biden and Vice President Harris can no longer sweep their unmitigated disaster of epic proportions that they created under the rug.”
The subpoena for Blinken’s testimony is the latest in a series of moves by McCaul and other House Republicans over the last 18 months to hold the Biden administration accountable for what they have called a “stunning failure of leadership” after Taliban forces seized the Afghan capital of Kabul, far more rapidly than U.S. intelligence had foreseen as American forces pulled out.
The committee is expected to summarize its work in an investigative report to be released Monday, amid the contentious presidential election where Republican nominee Donald Trump has tried to elevate the withdrawal from Afghanistan as a campaign issue.
Twenty years of war, more than 2,400 dead. More than $7 billion in arms left behind. Thousands of Afghans who aided the United States military left to the tender mercies of the Taliban. The Afghanistan people thrown back into the 12th century, with women less than cattle and an oppressive government matched only by the madman in North Korea.
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Why the hell shouldn't it be a campaign issue? Trump hasn't "tried to elevate the withdrawal from Afghanistan" as a campaign issue. It already is one.
The Democrats are pretending it's a non-issue, too. Rep. Gregory W. Meeks of New York, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, claimed McCaul's subpoena was one of many “political stunts that show the Republican Party’s desperation to score headlines during an election season.”
The Biden administration stonewalled McCaul's investigation from the beginning. It's no surprise that Blinken would refuse to testify and shed light on the mistakes made by the president and his people in incompetently exiting from Afghanistan.
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