Republicans probe humiliating US retreat from Afghanistan in 2021

Republicans have launched an investigation into the humiliating US withdrawal from Afghanistan by the Biden administration in 2021 after 20 years of war and occupation of the impoverished country. 

Michael McCaul, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said on Friday he had written to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken requesting an array of records, from intelligence assessments to communications with the Taliban, who are now ruling the country. 

"It is absurd and disgraceful that the Biden administration has repeatedly denied our longstanding oversight requests and continues to withhold information related to the withdrawal," said McCaul, a longstanding opposition member on the panel who became its chairman after the House flipped to Republican control at the start of the year.

"In the event of continued noncompliance, the committee will use the authorities available to it to enforce these requests as necessary, including through a compulsory process."

The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, despite the fact that no Afghan national was involved in the attacks. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans died in the US war of aggression on the country.

American forces had occupied the country for about two decades on the pretext of fighting against the Taliban. But as the US forces left Afghanistan, the Taliban stormed into the capital Kabul in August 2021, weakened by continued foreign occupation.

Republicans seemed to be more concerned about 13 American troops who were killed on August 26, 2021 in a bombing outside Kabul's airport as the capital fell, rather than the two-decade-long occupation of the country. 

The chaotic US military retreat from Afghanistan preceded a sharp drop in President Joe Biden's approval ratings, nine months after he was declared the winner of the disputed November 2020 presidential election, which former President Donald Trump said was rigged in favor of Biden. 

Trump and his Republican Party have roundly criticized Biden's handling of the withdrawal and vowed hearings as part of a series of probes into his administration.

The US State Department responded that "it is committed to working with congressional committees with jurisdiction over US foreign policy" to help them "conduct oversight for their legitimate legislative purposes."

"As of November 2022, the Department has provided more than 150 briefings to bipartisan members and staff on Afghanistan policy since the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan," a State Department spokesperson said.

Trump has called the Biden administration’s retreat from Afghanistan "the most embarrassing, incompetent, and humiliating event in the history of the United States."

The Taliban took over the capital Kabul on August 8, 2021, and declared that the war in Afghanistan was over.

The US was forced to close the embassy in Kabul and evacuate diplomats and staff by helicopters.

US presidents ‘never held accountable for crimes of war’: Analyst

US presidents and other American officials are “never held accountable for crimes of war and against humanity,” according to an American political analyst.

American journalist Don DeBar told Press TV that “the entire Afghan war, since Jimmy Carter started it (using George Bush, the first's CIA and Donald Rumsfeld's military intelligence) and George Bush II deployed regulars, through the Obama-Trump and now the Biden administration's time, has been a ‘Saigon moment,’” referring to the 1975 hasty evacuation of remaining American troops from Vietnam when the city of Saigon fell two years after former President Richard Nixon withdrew American forces in the country.

“It's the decades-long war on the people of Afghanistan that the US began conducting during the Carter Administration, which brought the Taliban and other fundamentalists to power over the secularists who had come to power seeking peace with its neighbor, the USSR, looking to build a democratic modern economy using a socialist model. Carter and his NSA advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, lit a match intended to stop them and burn the fingers of Moscow. Instead, the fire has been consuming the people of Afghanistan ever since, including up to this day,” the analyst said.

“It is reminiscent of the other national humiliation in what is now known as Ho Chi Minh city, then Saigon, where the US beat another hasty exit after a ridiculously long war that consumed millions of Vietnamese. There, again, what was done to the people of Vietnam is the US national shame, not the decision to finally leave,” he noted.

US Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had called Washington’s retreat from Afghanistan "a lot worse than Saigon in 1975.”

In addition, Republican Senator Ben Sasse had also called the fall of Kabul "worse than Saigon" for the United States.

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