The House Foreign Affairs Committee announced Sunday the release of its 354-page report on the disastrous withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
It has been over three years since the U.S. completed its deadly pullout from Afghanistan on August 30, 2021.
During the course of the pullout, 13 U.S. soldiers and more than 170 Afghan civilians were killed, and more than 150 persons, including both U.S. service members and Afghan civilians, were injured. Former President Donald Trump recently paid tribute to the fallen soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery at the request of the soldiers’ families.
The U.S. military also left behind a substantial amount of equipment during the withdrawal, amounting to an estimated $7 billion worth of military equipment, including vehicles, aircraft, weapons, and other gear. The abandoned equipment included several helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, Humvees and Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles, and numerous rifles, ammunition, and other military supplies, which the Taliban subsequently seized.
Although the exact number is difficult to pinpoint, many individuals who had assisted the U.S. and its allies, such as interpreters, contractors, and other support personnel, were also left behind to face a perilous and life-threatening situation. Estimates suggest that thousands of these individuals and their families were left behind after the evacuation was completed. An utter betrayal of all those who had assisted U.S. and allied forces at risk of life.
Following the U.S. pullout, the Taliban declared victory.
Fox News has all the details on the new report. Here’s the start of the story:
Texas Rep. Mike McCaul, the Republican chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, released a scathing report that took a fine-toothed comb to the military’s botched 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal and highlighted areas of serious mismanagement.
The Republican-led report opens by harkening back to President Joe Biden’s urgency to withdraw from the Vietnam War as a senator in the 1970s. That, along with the Afghanistan withdrawal, demonstrates a “pattern of callous foreign policy positions and readiness to abandon strategic partners,” according to the report.
The report also disputed Biden’s assertion that his hands were tied to the Doha agreement former President Trump had made with the Taliban establishing a deadline for U.S. withdrawal for the summer of 2021, and it revealed how state officials had no plan for getting Americans and allies out while there were still troops there to protect them.
Here’s a roundup of the findings of the more than 350-page report, comprised of tens of thousands of pages of documents and interviews with high-level officials that spanned much of the last two years: