A Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives has claimed that Joe Biden actively ignored warnings about the likely collapse of Afghanistan upon the U.S. withdrawal from the country.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, Congressman Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the current chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was recently given access to a State Department cable that the Biden Administration has refused to release. The cable included concerns from American diplomats at the embassy in the capital city of Kabul, attempting to warn the administration of the coming danger as the Taliban prepared to retake the country.
“The dissenters were absolutely right about everything they said,” said McCaul, “and it was a warning to the administration about what was going to happen and what they needed to do. Unfortunately, the administration didn’t heed all their warnings and we got what we got.”
The State Department’s initial refusal to hand the cable over to McCaul led to the chairman threatening to hold Secretary of State Antony Blinken in contempt, at which point the State Department finally relented.
In 2021, the Biden Administration infamously made the decision to extend the original withdrawal date from May of 2021 to September 11, 2021, in a purely symbolic move to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. After further criticism, he moved the final withdrawal date to August 31. However, in early August, the Taliban began advancing rapidly across the country, retaking large territories and various other key cities as they marched towards Kabul.
In the final days of August, U.S. forces began a hasty withdrawal that resulted in many American citizens, as well as billions in equipment, weapons, and other resources, being left behind in the soon-to-be-hostile country. Viral videos showed desperate Afghan citizens clinging to the outside of American aircraft as they tried to take off, with many falling to their deaths after takeoff. The disastrous withdrawal led to bipartisan and international condemnation of the Biden Administration, and the event was widely seen as the turning point in Biden’s presidency, when approval ratings finally fell into the negative range, where they have remained to this day.