GOP Rep. McCaul blasts Biden for ‘failure to plan’ pullout of Afghanistan

​The top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee — which plans to release a report this week on the military withdrawal from Afghanistan — knocked the Biden administration for its “complete lack and failure to plan” the exit.

Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, the ranking Republican on the panel, said there were “many sins” committed during the botched pullout that resulted in the deaths of abandonment of thousands of Afghans who assisted the US in its 20-year war.

“There was a complete lack and failure to plan. There was no plan and there was no plan executed,” McCaul said in an interview Sunday on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”

“I think the State Department probably didn’t have the resources it needed to carry out an evacuation of this size and enormity,” he continued.

“They had 36 consular officers at HKIA trying to process hundreds​ ​of thousands of people,” he lawmaker said, referring to the chaotic scenes surrounding Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul last year. 

“They were overwhelmed, but there were so many mistakes​.”

​McCaul and other Republicans on the committee said their interim report on the Afghanistan​ exit will be released this week, and they promised an intensive examination of the withdrawal — that includes issuing subpoenas to administration officials — if the GOP regains control of Congress in November’s midterm elections.​

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The 118-page report, “A Strategic Failure: Assessing the Administration’s Afghanistan Withdrawal,” names 34 current and former officials the Republicans say the State Department has blocked from testifying, The Hill reported on Sunday. ​

The GOP lawmakers say they will also seek material the State Department has yet to provide the panel, including ​​“documents, messages, reports, legal opinions, meeting readouts, and other materials related to the withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

“The Biden administration’s, and specifically the State Department’s, refusal to provide Congress with the necessary information regarding America’s unconditional withdrawal from Afghanistan has hampered the Minority Committee’s ability to complete a thorough investigation,” the report​, obtained by The Hill, says. 

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While the report examines President Biden’s efforts to comply with deadlines put in place in an agreement between former President Donald Trump and the Taliban, it concentrates on the administration’s missteps that led to the disastrous evacuation of Americans and Afghan allies.

It also analyzes the decisions that led to US troops being pulled out of Afghanistan before American citizens and, how in the absence of the US military, the Taliban quickly retook territory across the country and overthrew the government in Kabul.​

“The Biden administration had largely wasted the four months since the president announced the full withdrawal, failing to adequately plan for the anticipated Taliban takeover,” the committee wrote in the report. ​

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McCaul, in the CBS interview, said the intelligence community and the Pentagon were right in their assessments that Afghanistan was going to fall. ​

“And then we went to State and they paint — and the White House — a very rosy picture. There’s a disconnect between intelligence on the ground and what the White House is doing in this report,” McCaul said.

He added that the failures led to images of US embassy personnel being evacuated by helicopters like the fall of Saigon in 1975.

T​he report slams the lack of a military presence at Kabul’s airport to contain the massive crowds of Afghans who streamed to the base in a desperate attempt to flee the Taliban’s return to power and to process the thousands of Afghan allies who worked with the US during the war. ​   

“The failure to anticipate a surge of refugees at the Kabul airport​ … despite the military assessing Kabul to be at risk of falling to the Taliban, combined with an inadequate number of US personnel initially deployed, created the powder keg that exploded with the chaotic scenes that reverberated around the world, including images of Afghans falling to their deaths,” the lawmakers wrote.  

T​he report cites internal State Department documents that show the number of consular officers in Kabul never went beyond 36 personnel – ​“roughly one consular officer for every 3,444 evacuees.”

In the report, the Republicans say if the following administration officials refuse to appear they will be subpoenaed, including:  ​​Secretary of State Antony Blinken; Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Brian McKeon; U​nited States Agency for International Development Administrator Samantha Power; Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and national security adviser Jake Sullivan.