VOA interview: House committee chairman speaks on Afghan withdrawal report
Speaking with Saba Shah Khan of VOA's Urdu Service, McCaul, a Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, denied that the latest probe was a "political exercise" that coincides with a tight presidential race. He said its purpose was to ensure that "an evacuation will never happen like this again."
On Tuesday, the committee's ranking Democrat, Representative Gregory Meeks from New York, issued a statement criticizing the report as a collection of “cherry-picked witness testimony” that excludes “anything unhelpful to a predetermined, partisan narrative about the Afghanistan withdrawal.”
“The Majority did not involve the Minority in this report, nor have they even provided a draft copy to us,” he wrote.
In the following interview, McCaul accuses White House officials of “stonewalling” the investigation and mentions his September 3 decision to subpoena Secretary of State Antony Blinken for testimony even though findings of the full report were released Monday.
“We’re still not finished with the investigation,” McCaul told VOA on Tuesday.
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller last week issued a statement to The Hill stating that Blinken was unable to testify on the dates requested and offered "reasonable alternatives" to comply with McCaul's request.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
VOA: Why is the Foreign Affairs Committee report on U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan being released now? With less than two months left to Election Day, some would say the report is politically driven.
U.S. Representative Michael McCaul: It's been three years since the ... chaotic evacuation. The first year, the majority — at that time, the Democrats — did nothing to investigate. So, I've had two years to put this very comprehensive, complete, historic account of what happened together. In the meantime, we served many subpoenas. We've had to threaten contempt proceedings. And I would have liked to have had this done a year ago. The administration has been, you know, stonewalling us and slowing down the delivery of the report. In fact, we're still not finished with the investigation.
VOA: In light of the report, what do you think the Biden administration could have done differently to avoid the chaos and mayhem that unfolded during the withdrawal?
McCaul: That’s one of the key takeaways here. The military is on the ground doing their job. That's to pull out by July [as dictated by a predetermined date of withdrawal negotiated by the prior administration]. The intelligence community sees what's happening. They report this information. It gets a little bit manipulated when it gets to the higher level. And then it is amplified that everything's fine in Afghanistan, when, in fact, on the ground, the conditions are getting very bad.
The State Department is required by law to come out with an evacuation plan called the NEO [Noncombatant Evacuation Operations]. They kept resisting this because they thought evacuation means failure. So, they wait until the very day that the Taliban is overrunning Kabul before they finally initiate an evacuation plan. That is why it was so chaotic. That is why the 13 servicemen and women were left behind — with Taliban, by the way — to work with them to help Afghans get out.
VOA: The report says that [President Joe] Biden kept Zalmay Khalilzad on as special representative [for Afghanistan reconciliation from September 2018 to October 2021], making it clear Biden embraced the [February 2020] Doha Accord. Sir, was that a good decision?
McCaul: The complaint I had — and Zal and I, you know, I've known him for a long time, and I have respect for him — but he did not include the Afghan government in the Doha talks. So, it was just between Zal Khalilzad and the Taliban. That sent a terrible message to the Afghan government. They felt like they were sidelined. ... The Doha Agreement had conditions. Most important is the Taliban cannot hit U.S. forces. They were continuing to do that. But according to President Biden's press guy [former State Department spokesperson Ned Price], Doha was “immaterial” as to the evacuation. He was going to go to zero — that means zero troops, zero contractors, zero air power — one way or the other. That was going to happen. He made that decision on day one.
VOA: The [Doha] negotiations and the decision to leave Afghanistan was made during the Trump administration. Chairman, do you think....
McCaul: ... that isn’t accurate, because the Taliban were in violation of the Doha conditions. Twenty-five hundred troops were left on the ground — General [Kenneth] McKenzie and [Mark] Milly said that was sufficient to stabilize, along with 6,500 NATO and air power and contractors. That they could stabilize both Bagram and HKIA [Hamid Karzai International Airport] when it went to zero. That's when it changed.
VOA: The date of withdrawal was decided by the Trump administration…
McCaul: ... if conditions were met, which they weren't ...
VOA: ... do you think that it is fair to hold the Biden administration solely responsible for the failure?
McCaul: And we don't. We actually fault Zal Khalilzad. We list a lot of top D.O.D. [Department of Defense] and State Department officials that Congress, in a resolution, will condemn for their actions. Zal Khalilzad, he's a dear friend, but by not letting the Afghan government participate — to me, that was a major error. And a lot of this, by not executing a plan of action to get out and evacuate, according to the top generals and the intelligence community, was the fatal flaw, leaving behind Americans, Afghan allies, and most importantly, the women.
VOA: The report also says that the U.S. did not keep track of whether the Taliban were following the Doha Agreement. In your opinion, how could the U.S. have made Taliban comply?
McCaul: In my opinion, they were in violation at the time the president made the decision to go to zero. But according to his press spokesperson, that was immaterial to the withdrawal. It was going to happen one way or the other. What people don't understand is it's not just the military being pulled out, it's the air cover, it's the contractors. When everything is pulled out, the Afghan army was virtually defenseless.
VOA: It is also said in the report that Afghanistan is a hotbed of terrorist activities. Can U.S. leave Taliban to their doings? And what is the way forward?
McCaul: It’s very, very dangerous. I was the chairman of Homeland Security Committee. What we're seeing now, and we saw it before, is the Haqqani [network and] Taliban protecting Zawahiri, [the] number two Al-Qaeda [figure], who was taken by drone strike not too long after the evacuation. We know that they were collaborating — ISIS-K and Taliban — because United States is a common enemy.
Most disturbingly is Bagram, the prisons in Bagram. They [the Taliban] released thousands of ISIS prisoners that have now gone to the Khorasan region — that's Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan — [for] external operations. Just recently, the FBI indicated to us that eight of them have been detained in the United States coming across the southwest border. ... So, when Americans think Afghanistan is some faraway, distant land, it is all interconnected and it does threaten the homeland.
VOA: What is the way forward? What do you think the U.S. strategy should be to handle this?
McCaul: Number one, we don't want to see this happen again. This was not a political exercise for me. As a [former] federal prosecutor, I just wanted to get to the facts and the evidence, wherever that took me. I didn’t have conclusions in advance. ... So, to answer your question, we want to propose a new way to do this legislatively, through Congress, so that an evacuation will never happen like this again. Saigon was bad. This is worse.
VOA: The report quotes a study that 118 girls were sold as child brides in Afghanistan, in a village. And, in the same village, 116 parents are waiting for a buyer. So, my question to you is that it seems like there is no hope for women and girls in Afghanistan. What is your suggestion? And what can the U.S do?
McCaul: I mean, can you imagine being 25 years old as a woman and never lived under Sharia law, and now you have to go backwards to the stone age? And that's essentially what has happened there. I got four busloads of the American School of Music girls out through Abbey Gate, because I knew the Taliban — the way they feel about women and music — their days would be numbered. Now, it's very difficult. Do you normalize the Taliban? Do you treat them as a foreign terrorist organization?
I think any aid or assistance we give to Afghanistan has to be conditioned on treatment of women and children. And they should be allowed to go to school, they should be allowed to go outside their homes, they should not be beaten. Just fundamental rights.
This story originated in VOA's Urdu Service.