Monday marked a year since the U.S. pulled its last batch of troops from Afghanistan, essentially closing the door on a lengthy war that began nearly a month after the 9/11 attacks.
Austin NBC affiliate KXAN reported that U.S. House Republicans plan to release a report titled “'A Strategic Failure’: Assessing the Administration’s Afghanistan Withdrawal” that criticizes the White House for the pullout.
U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Austin) told KXAN that the U.S. Department of State turned a blind eye to the warnings of the intelligence community in the war-torn Southwest Asian nation.
KXAN reported that the Biden administration announced Aug. 31, 2021 as the official withdrawal date as opposed to the one slated for three months earlier set by former President Donald Trump in 2020.
The resurgence of the Taliban that summer proved too much for the Afghan military, prompting what was reportedly a messy evacuation of U.S. citizens and Afghan nationals who aided the coalition forces since 2001.
“They didn’t really have a plan to process hundreds of thousands of potential evacuees,” McCaul, whose district stretches from the northwestern portion of the Greater Houston region to the Greater Austin region, said, KXAN reported.
The legislator, a ranking Republican member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, added that approximately 100,000 Afghans who helped the Americans didn’t leave the country during the evacuation process.
Austin Journal reported last August that McCaul slammed Biden’s decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan as a “stain” on his then-fledgling presidency.
"The rapidly deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan is an unmitigated disaster of epic proportions on the shoulders of [the president],” the congressman said in a tweet at the time, per the publication. “This will be a stain on his presidency, and he will have blood on his hands. He owns this."