House hearing on troop withdrawal from Afghanistan due to begin Wednesday

March 7 (UPI) — The House Foreign Affairs Committee will hold its first hearing Wednesday on the question of withdrawing the United States from Afghanistan in August 2021.

The two groups that organized charter flights out of the country, Allied Airlift 21 and Task Force Pineapple, will testify before a Republican-led committee that criticized the departure of the Biden administration.

The Committee stated in statement that the hearing would be based on a report released last August that said the Biden administration did not hand over enough exit paperwork.

“The failure of the Biden administration, and in particular the State Department, to provide Congress with the necessary information about America’s unconditional withdrawal from Afghanistan prevented the Minority Committee from conducting a thorough investigation,” the report says. report said.

As the United States completed its withdrawal, on August 26, 13 U.S. service members were killed in a coordinated bombing raid by ISIS-K militants near an airport in Kabul. President Joe Biden later ordered a drone strike against ISIS-K targets in Kabul, also killing several civilians.

Over 124,000 people in total were evacuated out of the country and billions of dollars of American weapons left behind.

A report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction concluded that the withdrawal of US military forces was a contributing factor to the collapse of the Afghan government in August 2021, followed by Taliban troops quickly seizing Kabul.

“The single most important factor in the collapse … was the US decision to withdraw military forces and contractors from Afghanistan through the signing of the US-Taliban agreement in February 2020 under the Trump administration, followed by President Biden’s announcement of a troop withdrawal in April 2021,” reads in the report.

SIGAR added that the morale of the Afghan forces had been “damaged” by the US troop withdrawal and especially the talks between former President Donald Trump, who initially reached an agreement on US troop withdrawal, and the Taliban.

The Foreign Affairs Committee is not the only committee in the House of Representatives seeking more information on Afghanistan from the Biden administration.

“The Biden administration was tragically unprepared to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, and their decisions in the region led directly to national security and humanitarian disaster,” said James Comer, Kentucky, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. said in a statement.

Comer and other Republicans sent letters to the White House, the US Department of Defense, the US State Department, the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Agency for International Development, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff asking for information for oversight hearings.

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