The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee demanded the State Department release the department’s review of the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The committee received the After-Action Review, dated March 2022, on April 6, though the 87-page document had “unexplained redactions,” Rep. Michael McCaul , the chairman of the committee, said in a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken dated on Tuesday."Despite having been completed for over a year, this document has yet to be shared with the American people," he wrote.
The unclassified summary placed much of the blame on how the withdrawal played out on the previous administration, even though President Joe Biden chose to uphold a deal then-President Donald Trump agreed to with the Taliban regarding withdrawing forces in 2021. Kirby, while taking questions from reporters about the document on April 6, denied there was any chaos in the evacuations, which ultimately resulted in the transportation of roughly 120,000 Afghans out of Afghanistan who feared life under the Taliban.
McCaul said in the letter that both Kirby’s remarks and the summary itself “blamed the failures of the withdrawal almost entirely on the Trump Administration, despite the fact that the decision to proceed with an unconditional withdrawal on April 14, 2021, was made by President Biden and control of the withdrawal’s timeline, planning, and execution rested with the Biden Administration.”
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