House Democrats and the Biden administration continue to obstruct the investigation.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Last month, the Brits had a knock-down and drag-out fight over the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee denounced the “fundamental lack of planning, grip or leadership at a time of national emergency” and blasted the Foreign Office for having “provided answers that were intentionally evasive and often deliberately misleading”.
“The former head of the armed forces told us that the decision to withdraw was ‘strategically illiterate and morally bankrupt,’” the committee’s report noted.
“The international withdrawal from Afghanistan has been a disaster in terms of planning, execution and consequences for the U.K.’s wider interests,” it concluded. “It undermined the security of the United Kingdom by encouraging our enemies to act against us.”
While British parliamentary proceedings are often vitriolic, nothing was being said here that was more than common sense. Meanwhile American military personnel, veterans, and families who had lost loved ones in Afghanistan were once again being denied closure and real answers.
The Foreign Affairs Committee report and the calls for the resignations of British officials are refreshing. No American official has resigned over the disaster and Democrats are doing everything possible to stalemate any serious legislative hearings into what happened.
In sharp contrast to the British parliamentary proceedings, House Democrats recently managed to hold a classified hearing over a war and subsequent defeat that ended nearly a year ago.
As Republican members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee noted, “even though the State Department offered to have a portion of the hearing unclassified”, Democrats decided “to close it to the public and make the question-and-answer section at one of the highest levels of classification, TS/SCI.” TS/SCI means Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information.
When members of Congress are more bent on keeping a hearing closed than the State Department, it’s hard to describe that as anything more than a cover-up for political purposes.
There was no reason for a hearing billed as being about “the evolution of U.S. policy towards Afghanistan from 2017 through August 2021” to be fully classified under TS/SCI. Afghan government officials have fled, American forces are no longer on the ground, and the Taliban and its Al Qaeda allies are in charge. If there’s any intelligence still being gained from human or electronic sources, that could have been easily kept classified or left out of the hearing.
Especially when that hearing deals with decisions made between 1 and 5 years ago.
The officials doing the talking, like Molly Phee, the Deputy Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, who claimed to have “established the conditions that can transform the trajectory of the conflict,” are not superspooks, they’re Foggy Bottom bureaucrats who have failed at most things and, like Phee, promoted to Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs after the disaster in Afghanistan, just keep failing upwards until even worse things happen.
The hearings would have been an opportunity to ask Phee, Zalmay Khalilzad’s deputy, some pointed questions. House Democrats understood that keeping the hearings classified would make that a pointless exercise, allowing senior officials to recite talking points no one will hear.
Chairman Gregory Meeks claimed that the hearing had to be classified to “ensure that Members have access to the most detailed information available — including information that cannot be disclosed in an unclassified setting.” What information is that? Well, it’s classified.
Meeks could have agreed to hold multiple hearings, public and private, on this crucial issue.
Foreign Affairs Committee members pointed out that, “our committee has to date only had one open, full committee hearing with an official from the Biden administration.” Much like holding a hearing under TS/SCI classification, there’s no defensible reason except deliberate obstruction.
While the beginning of Biden’s downfall in the polls can be closely traced to the Afghan withdrawal, empty shelves, inflation, and the economic crisis have long since taken over, but as the anniversary of the withdrawal approaches, the Afghanistan stonewalling has not stopped.
Around the same time that the British parliament was having it out, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) issued a report on the collapse of the Afghan army that blamed the disastrous Taliban deal and the poorly planned withdrawal.
The report pointed to decisions such as “limiting airstrikes after the signing of the U.S.-Taliban agreement” and the entire fallacy of trying to turn the Afghan military into a “mirror image of U.S. forces” that “required a high degree of professional military sophistication and leadership” and was dependent on airpower.
SIGAR documented the fact that no one essentially knew how much military equipment was in Afghanistan, who was using it, and how much of it the Taliban have in their possession now.
Its appendix contains the withering big picture assessment that “the U.S. military has mounted four large-scale security sector assistance (SSA) efforts in the last 72 years, and three of the four have been catastrophic failures. In Vietnam and Afghanistan, the United States spent years and billions of dollars training and equipping national armies, only to see them quickly collapse in the face of far less-equipped insurgencies once U.S. logistical, equipment enabler, and air support were withdrawn.”
The explicit comparison between Vietnam and Afghanistan is important, not just as a partisan talking point, but as an analysis of what went wrong in two of the most devastating recent wars.
And how little we learned from them.
This is one of the things we need to be talking about at a congressional level before we do it all over again a decade or two from now. SIGAR has been dutifully issuing reports with such titles as “Contracting with the Enemy: DOD Has Not Fully Implemented Processes Intended to Prevent Payments to Enemies of the United States” and “Theft of Funds from Afghanistan: An Assessment of Allegations Concerning President Ghani and Former Senior Afghan Officials.”
But once SIGAR’s work is wrapped up, it will be all too easy to bury those reports.
Meanwhile the Biden administration and House Democrats are colluding to suppress any meaningful accounting or discussion of what happened in Afghanistan. Even as the House Democrats are obsessively holding hearings over January 6, they have sabotaged and obstructed public hearings about Afghanistan to protect their administration and allies.
If the British Parliament, led by the ruling party, can hold scathing no-holds barred hearings into the treasonous actions, bad decisions, and corrupt policies that went into the defeat, there’s no reason that the United States Congress can’t do the same thing. And as the August anniversary of the debacle approaches, House Democrats will have to work harder to stop the truth.
somehistory says
They don’t want the public to know anything about what they did and didn’t do because then, heads might roll right off some ballots.
They brought many terrorists into this country and left terrorists in control there, while allowing and making possible, deaths to Americans and some others who had valid reasons for wanting to get out.
Corruption, lies, more corruption….much like the taliban.
Walter Sieruk says
The ancient Greek philosopher , Plato , wrote ” The measure of a man is what he does with power.”
Joe Biden has shown since he had entered the Office of the US Presidency , with his many despicable policies in Afghanistan and his working to appease and even supports the Taliban, in different ways, which is treasonous.
Therefore that villain , Joe Biden has revealed since he obtained the power of the US Presidency that his “measure” is terribly lacking. So much so that his “measure” is so very negative that it’s on the side of evil. Absolute evil.
Walter Sieruk says
Joe Biden and his advisory crew , his handlers ,once in power not long after January 20, 2021 created a disaster in Afghanistan by giving it all to the Taliban and leaving them high quality US military equipment as well as many different types of US military vehicles and at the same abandoning ,as in stranding many Americans Afghanistan to the ruthless vicious revenge ofthe Taliban.
Likewise allowing into the United States many unvetted Afghan “refugees.” there is that awful probable chance that some of them are very dangerous,, some being secret jihadists and some non -jihadist Muslim “refugees” who have always sexaually assulted young American girls and women because their religion/culture is very much full of misogyny.
That horrible fiend of a man Joe Biden and is wicked top staff, handlers , are horrendously awful
This should not only alarm all patriotic Americans but should also put to shame those decent US citizens who became distracted on election day in November 2020 and thus didn’t vote for the reelection of President Trump.
As the ancient Greek Philosopher , Plato , had wisely written ” The price that good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
Walter Sieruk says
About Joe Biden and the catastrophe he created in Afghanistan, it’s worse than terrible.
Just think of all those Americans and out good Afghans friends he abandoned in Afghanistan to be encountered captured tortured and murdered by the bloodthirsty Taliban.
To make matters even worse Biden admitted many unchecked and unvetted “refugees” into and throughout the United States , a number of them , not doubt are criminal and secret jihadists scheming and waiting for the time they consider to engage in murderous violence.
The innocent people who will be murdered by them will guilty and likewise Biden will also then have their blood on his sinister wicked and destructive hands.
All that evil in Afghanistan would never have happened if that President Pretender, Joe Biden just threw away and totally destroyed nearly twenty years of progress accomplished by the blood sweat and tears and even the deaths of many Americans as well as those blood, sweat and tears of America’s allies.
Also Biden threw away more than trillion of the American taxpayer’s money that was invested in for the betterment and development of Afghanistan.
This tragic scenario didn’t actually have to had happen in Afghanistan because the generals of the Pentagon who are strategic military advisers to the President strongly counseled Biden not to have a sharp, sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan but instead have and start a gradual drawback of the US armed forces after September 11, 2021.
The problem was that the arrogant conceited and stupid Joe Biden refused to heed or listen to the wise council of the intellects of the Pentagon. Therefore is this complete catastrophe with the Taliban total takeover of Afghanistan.
In the ancient but wisdom filled book by Sun Tzu entitled THE ART OF WAR, it is written “He will win who has the military capability and is not interfered with the sovereign.”
That awful incompetent and probably even treasonous villain, Joe Biden, ruined everything.
Walter Sieruk says
The bloodthirsty vicious Muslims who make up the Taliban with their evil mindset and behavior are nothing new or original . Such malicious monsters have been around as far back as far as to ancient times.
For as the Bible informs it’s reader about fiends “inventors of evil things..” Romans 1:30. K.J.V.] In those ancient days gone by there were inventors of cruel and deadly devices called “bobbie traps.” made out of this such as sharp wooden spikes.
Now in modern times the fiends who are the Taliban make cruel and deadly bobbie trapes called “Improvised Explosive Devices ” that are made out of gun power scrap metal, nails and other terrible things.
Furthermore the very next verse , 31, also rather fits the horrendous characters of the Taliban, Which reads “Without understanding , covenant breakers , without natural affection , implacable ,unmerciful.”
Walter Sieruk says
The policies of Joe Biden led to disaster in Afghanistan. So much so that attempts are still being made to hide and coverup all the facts;