Editorials & Other Articles

GOP probe of Afghanistan exit rips Biden, labors to implicate Harris

The report, following two years of investigation, was criticized as “nakedly partisan” by Democrats who were unmoved by its lack of new insights.


American personnel carry the remains of service members killed by a suicide bomber at Kabul's airport amid the U.S. withdrawal of Afghanistan in August 2021. (1st Lt. Mark Andries/Marine Corps/AP)

By Abigail Hauslohner and Dan Lamothe
September 8, 2024 at 8:00 p.m. EDT

The Republican leadership of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Sunday released a sprawling report on the U.S. exit from Afghanistan three years ago, blasting President Joe Biden and his administration as the callous and “dogmatic” orchestrator of a foreign policy failure so extreme that it ranked “far worse” than even America’s catastrophic withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975.

Democrats swiftly dismissed the 240-page report, the product of a two-year GOP investigation, as “nakedly partisan” and as the cynical manipulation of tragedy for use as a “political football.”

The document arrives just two months ahead of a tightly contested presidential election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, and on the eve of their highly anticipated debate Tuesday in Philadelphia. Both parties said the timing of its release was intended to underscore Republicans’ recent efforts to revive public scrutiny of the withdrawal, which the committee’s chairman, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), suggested could “disqualify” Harris in the minds of voters.

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