The missing link in the Afghanistan hearings

A year's worth of hearings on the US withdrawal failed to address Afghanistan's current nightmare

Tuesday’s House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Afghanistan marked the grand finale of a year-long Republican-led soap opera that scrutinized and critiqued President Biden's handling of the chaotic fall of Kabul in August 2021 and America’s disastrous evacuation from the country.

Retired army generals, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, and the former commander of US Central Command, Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, testified about the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan that culminated in a suicide attack that claimed the lives of 13 Americans and roughly 200 Afghans and left thousands of Afghan allies behind.

The generals highlighted logistical nightmares, intelligence failures and the lightning-fast collapse of Afghan security forces against the Taliban's advances. Milley said the "fundamental flaw" of the withdrawal was the timing of the US State Department's order to evacuate civilians.

To be clear, this series of hearings was important in providing much-needed accountability and lessons learned from this dark chapter in American history. President Biden had promised to get out of Afghanistan during his presidential campaign and had eight months in office to prevent the chaos that ensued in the final days. He failed to do that and never really took responsibility for his decisions.

But let's not forget the political circus that unfolded over the past year. It was a golden opportunity for Republicans to score points against Biden, while conveniently forgetting about President Trump’s initial deal with the Taliban in 2020 to pull out of Afghanistan without any conditions. We could have used some intellectual honesty here: Biden surely deserves a lot of the blame, just not all of it.

More importantly, the narrative throughout the hearings rarely shifted from political blame games to discussions about the shit-show that is Afghanistan today.

For example, during a hearing last November entitled “Go-to-Zero: Joe Biden’s Withdrawal Order and the Taliban Takeover of Afghanistan,” the House Foreign Affairs Committee interviewed former Lt. General Sami Sadat. Sadat, who was commander of the Afghan special forces when the country fell to the Taliban, was among thousands airlifted out of Afghanistan when America ended its 20-year military presence in the country.

But he is also the chairman of the Afghanistan United Front, a group of former Afghan military and political leaders now planning for a post-Taliban Afghanistan, and his many attempts to discuss Afghanistan’s future and its perilous present during the hearing were all but ignored by the committee.

According to the United Nations, Afghanistan is facing one of the worst humanitarian crises in its history, with millions of people in urgent need of food assistance and clean water. The economy has contracted significantly, exacerbating poverty and unemployment. Basic services like healthcare are crumbling, putting the lives and futures of countless Afghans at risk.

The humanitarian crisis is intertwined with human rights abuses, particularly against women and minorities. The Taliban's return to power has led to a rollback of rights and freedoms, including restrictions on women's education, employment, and movement. Reports of violence, forced marriages, and targeted killings continue to emerge, painting a grim picture of life under Taliban rule.

Education, especially for girls, has been severely disrupted, with many schools closed or operating under restrictive conditions. This threatens to reverse years of progress in women's empowerment and gender equality, leaving a generation of Afghan girls without access to education and opportunities for a better future.

Diplomatic efforts to engage the Taliban-led government about the dire situation in the country have fallen flat, with the Taliban boycotting recent UN-led talks in Doha without formal recognition by the international community.

If you think none of this matters, a leaked Pentagon assessment shows that the country has once again become a staging ground for terrorism, with ISIS planning attacks across Europe and Asia, as well as conducting "aspirational plotting" against the United States.

Let’s also not forget the some-87,000 translators, contractors, and other Afghans who assisted the US. For three years they have been at risk for revenge attacks, kidnappings, and extrajudicial killings, yet are still waiting for their Special Immigrant Visas. The chairman of the committee, Republican Michael McCaul, revealed that the White House and Congress have agreed to grant 12,000 visas to Afghans who assisted the US. But it will be years before tens of thousands of Afghan allies are able to escape.

Congress has also yet to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation that would give a pathway to permanent legal status for almost 100,000 newly arrived Afghans who have restarted their lives in the US. They continue to live in legal limbo, retaining temporary status, all while they and their children have meshed into communities in nearly all 50 states plus the nation’s capital.

And that, my friends, is the tragedy of Afghanistan—political drama, humanitarian crises, and terrorist threats, all set against the backdrop of missed opportunities and unfulfilled promises.

For 20 years, this country waged war in Afghanistan, at the cost of almost 200,000 Afghan lives, only to see the Taliban return to power. We owe it the Afghan people to move past the political finger pointing about how we left and focus on solutions that give them a chance at a dignified life and insures the US doesn’t have to go back.