The Advisory Council on Women of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has strongly criticized the current government’s severe restrictions on women and girls in Afghanistan, labeling the denial of education for Afghan girls as a serious challenge for Islamic countries.
Amina Al-Hajri, Director General of the OIC’s Department of Cultural Affairs, based in Jeddah, stated that women in Islamic countries are profoundly affected by devastating wars and natural disasters. She emphasized that the prohibition on education for Afghan girls remains a concerning issue.
Al-Hajri also highlighted the harsh conditions faced by women in Palestine, who endure the heavy burdens of ongoing conflict.
The OIC has previously expressed deep concern over the status of Afghan women and has called for the removal of all restrictions imposed by the Taliban. The organization recently proposed to the Taliban government that it would support Afghan girls’ education if the group cooperated.
The OIC criticizes the current government’s ban on girls’ education, which has excluded Afghan girls above the sixth grade from schooling and subsequently barred female students from attending both public and private universities and educational institutions.
These restrictions have led to millions of girls being deprived of education. The United Nations and the international community have repeatedly called for the lifting of these bans on women’s rights to education and work in Afghanistan over the past three years, but the Taliban regime has so far ignored these appeals.
The ongoing restrictions on education and employment for Afghan women and girls represent a significant humanitarian and developmental crisis.
The international community’s calls for change underscore the need for urgent action to address these issues and ensure that Afghan women and girls can access their fundamental rights and opportunities for growth and development.
OIC urges action on education restrictions for girls in Afghanistan
The defence minister, Richard Marles, gave an update to parliament on Thursday on the government’s progress in acting on the longstanding recommendations from the Brereton inquiry into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.
He addressed the long-debated issue of command accountability, saying this was “the final step in government action emanating from the Brereton report”.
Marles told parliament that any criminal investigations and prosecutions were a separate matter that were being handled “at arms-length from the government” and could still take “years” to complete.
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Marles sent letters to potentially affected individuals – understood to be fewer than 15 people – on Wednesday to notify them about whether their awards were being cancelled or were being retained.
Guardian Australia understands there are fewer than 10 individuals whose awards will be cancelled.
Marles said he would not disclose the names or details due to privacy obligations, but that Australia was holding itself accountable for the allegations.
Maj Gen Paul Brereton, who led a four-year-long inquiry that presented its findings in 2020, found “credible” information to implicate 25 current or former Australian special forces personnel in the alleged unlawful killing of 39 individuals and the cruel treatment of two others in Afghanistan.
Investigations into criminal allegations are the responsibility of a separate body, the Office of the Special Investigator, and there is no information to suggest the actions announced on Thursday relate to those accused directly of committing misconduct.
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Australian defence chief releases report into allegations of war crimes in Afghanistan – video
Brereton wrote in his report that unnamed special operations troop, squadron and task group commanders bore “moral command responsibility and accountability for what happened under their command and control”.
But successive governments have long delayed making a decision on command accountability.
In a final report to the then defence minister, Peter Dutton, before the 2022 election, an oversight panel raised concerns that “the failure for any accountability to be required from senior officers … is widely resented in the [special forces] and a factor contributing to lowered morale”.
Marles received advice in May 2023 from the then chief of the Australian defence force, Angus Campbell, about the command accountability, including recommendations about stripping some commanders of honours or awards.
Campbell commanded Joint Task Force 633, based in the United Arab Emirates, from January 2011 to January 2012 and made regular visits to Afghanistan in that time, but there is no suggestion he will lose his Distinguished Service Cross.
Australian soldiers ‘thrown under the bus’ over alleged Afghanistan war crimes, SAS body says.
At a press conference on Thursday, Marles was asked why Campbell would not lose that medal. The minister replied that he had “followed Brereton’s report to the letter”.
The report said Joint Task Force 633 “did not have the degree of command and control” over special operations forces in Afghanistan “on which the principle of command responsibility depends”.
But the Coalition’s defence spokesperson, Andrew Hastie, a former SAS captain who served in Afghanistan, told parliament he disagreed with the Brereton report on “how far it reaches up the chain in assigning responsibility”.
“I believe that our troops were let down by a lack of moral courage that went up the chain of command all the way to Canberra – including in this House,” Hastie told parliament on Thursday.
“From Tarin Kowt to Kabul to Kandahar to Dubai to Canberra, those in the chain of command should have asked more questions.”
The crossbench senator Jacqui Lambie accused the government of “throwing our diggers under the bus” and said it was “insensitive” for Marles to make the announcement just days after the royal commission report into veteran suicide.
Lambie told the Senate: “Yet, in his response, he still managed to forget one key thing: the accountability of the top brass.”
The decision on command accountability is separate from the previous government’s decision to retain the meritorious unit citation for more than 3,000 current or former ADF members who served in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2013.
Dutton overruled advice from defence leadership and decided to keep that citation in place. Marles had long insisted that the Labor government would not “rake over old coals in terms of decisions that have been made by the former government”.
Compensation to Afghan victims of alleged Australian war crimes has also been a long-debated issue but is finally progressing with a new regulation setting up a pathway for an Afghanistan inquiry compensation scheme.
The regulation says recipients must be considered by the ADF chief to be “reasonably likely to be the victim of an assault or property damage or a family member of a victim of an unlawful killing” and must not be a member of a terrorist organisation.
The executive director of the Australian Centre for International Justice, Rawan Arraf, said it was “disappointing that it has taken the Australian government over three-and-a-half years to address redress avenues for Afghan victims and their families” and raised concerns about “serious shortcomings of the scheme”.
Australian military officers to be stripped of honours after alleged war crimes under their command
Meanwhile, some citizens of the country have praised the launch of the TAPI project and other initiatives in Afghanistan.
After the commencement of the TAPI project in Afghanistan, it is expected that upon its completion, the country’s gas needs will be met, and Afghanistan’s revenues will increase as well.
This project, which holds significant importance at the regional level, will not only provide employment opportunities for over twenty thousand people but also supply the necessary gas to boost industries reliant on this resource.
Abdul Ghafar Nazimi, an expert in economic affairs, stated: “This project will bring multiple benefits to Afghanistan: economic, political, and social. It will lead to an economic revolution in the country.”
Meanwhile, some citizens of the country have praised the launch of the TAPI project and other initiatives in Afghanistan.
Ahmadullah, a resident of Kabul, said: “The inauguration of TAPI is a positive step, but its implementation is crucial because it will help reduce unemployment by creating jobs.”
Alongside the TAPI project, several other projects have also been launched, including the transfer of 500 kilovolts of electricity from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan, the fiber optic connection from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan, and the expansion of the Torghundi port railway.
Sakhi Ahmad Paiman, Deputy of the Chamber of Industries and Mines of Afghanistan, said: “Several economic projects like TAPI, railways, and electricity transfer from Turkmenistan to Pakistan will enhance regional integration and bring about regional security.”
The Ministry of Mines and Petroleum stated that the TAPI project, stretching from the Turkmenistan border to Guzara District in Herat Province, covers a length of 153 kilometers and will be completed in two years.
According to information from the ministry, the cost of the TAPI project up to Herat Province is 600 million dollars, which will be financed by Turkmenistan.
Homayoun Afghan, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum, said: “In Herat, the pipeline is 153 kilometers long, and, God willing, it will be completed in two years. Once completed in Herat, we will have practical access to Turkmenistan’s gas.”
This comes as yesterday the Prime Minister of the Islamic Emirate stated at the inauguration of the TAPI project’s implementation in Afghanistan that Turkmenistan’s move would strengthen the relations and friendship between the two countries.
TAPI: A Step Towards Afghanistan’s Self-Sufficiency in Gas
Islamic fascism, a harsh form of tyranny, is marked by oppressive rule, intolerance and violence. Its most extreme form today is seen here in Afghanistan, where freedom is crushed under severe suppression. Fascism in Afghanistan is a particularly cruel and horrific form of oppression, severely interfering in every aspect of life, especially for women. It controls everything from what we wear and where we go and most importantly, what we are allowed to think. Women are denied education, stripping us of the ability to think independently. However, the lack of freedom also affects men, who are similarly restricted from thinking or acting differently or speaking out against the rules imposed by the Taliban.
Women are removed from all areas of life, our voices and presence erased from society. Democracy and human rights are completely ignored, considered enemies of the Taliban regime. Children’s minds are molded through harsh indoctrination, turning them into tools that threaten freedom and particularly women. Thousands of innocent children are being educated in Taliban’s schools to become adversaries of women’s rights, democracy, progress and freedom. Through extreme religious indoctrination, they are being shaped into a serious threat to the entire world.
Society is controlled by constant surveillance, with police and cameras enforcing strict rules through fear and punishment. Personal expression is restricted, from laughter and fashion to haircuts and clothing, every detail of life is tightly regulated. Women are denied their rights to education, work, art and joy, reduced to mere shadows. The beauty salons have been shut down and some are operating underground, as even makeup and fashion are considered sin. Music and all forms of art and joy are banned, and instruments are destroyed in an act of repression. Progress for women and girls is met with hostility and their dreams are crushed under unrelenting opposition.
In this grim situation, the spirit of freedom is stifled, leaving only a bleak silence where the hope for freedom and progress seems like a distant dream. But the most painful fact is that the people of Afghanistan have been deliberately left in the grip of this extreme form of fascism by countries that claim to champion democracy and human rights.
The suffocating reality of living under Taliban oppression is powerfully conveyed by a young girl in Afghanistan. When asked how she feels being confined at home, deprived of all her rights as a woman, she closed her eyes and softly replied:
“I feel as if I am wandering through a dense, suffocating, dark and scary fog. Though my eyes are open, I can see nothing but a terrifying void. I rub my eyes, straining to glimpse a path, but all around me is a thick, gray haze.
I walk and run, endlessly lost, while only the voices of restriction echo around me – ‘Do not go there. Do not wear this. Do not laugh. Do not speak aloud.’ These commands are the only things I hear, but there is no direction, no way to escape, no hope, no one to rescue me. This is what it feels like to live under the Taliban in Afghanistan, trapped in a world where my dreams are stifled and my future remains a shadow in a dark and oppressive fog.”
Anonymous is a woman living in Afghanistan
‘Do not laugh. Do not wear this. Do not speak aloud’: life under the Taliban
Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and neighboring Turkmenistan on Wednesday marked the resumption of work on a long-delayed gas pipeline designed to run through the two countries, Pakistan and India.
The estimated $10 billion Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India, or TAPI, project is designed to annually transport up to 33 billion cubic meters of Turkmen natural gas from the southeastern Galkynysh field through the proposed 1,800-kilometer pipeline.
Prime Minister Mohammad Hassan Akhund of the de facto Taliban government traveled to the Turkmen border region of Mary and joined top leaders of the host country to inaugurate construction of a vital section of the TAPI project. It is intended to link the city of Serhetabat in Turkmenistan to Herat in western Afghanistan.
Turkmen President Serdar Berdimuhamedov joined and addressed the ceremony via video link. “This project will benefit not only the economies of the participating countries but also the entire region,” he said.
Taliban authorities declared a public holiday in Herat, the capital of the province of the same name, to mark the occasion, with posters celebrating the TAPI project plastered across the border city.
Initially signed in the early 1990s to provide natural gas to energy-deficient South Asia, the TAPI project has faced repeated delays due to years of Afghan hostilities, which ended in 2021 when the then-insurgent Taliban recaptured power as all U.S. and NATO forces exited the country.
While Turkmen leaders Wednesday pledged to enhance bilateral ties between Ashgabat and Kabul and carry forward the TAPI project, experts remain skeptical that the gas pipeline will become operational soon. They cite funding issues, U.S.-led Western economic sanctions on Afghanistan and the international community’s refusal to recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government over restrictions on Afghan women’s rights.
Islamabad’s persistent diplomatic and military tensions with New Delhi are also considered a significant obstacle to the materialization of the TAPI project.
According to officials of the participating countries, Pakistan and India, each one plans to purchase 42% of the gas exports, and Afghanistan will receive the rest. Kabul will also earn around $500 million in transit fees annually.
Pakistan’s relations with Afghanistan deteriorated after the Taliban takeover over terrorism concerns. Islamabad complains that Kabul shelters and facilitates fugitive anti-Pakistan militants to orchestrate cross-border terrorist attacks from Afghan sanctuaries, charges the Taliban reject.
Afghanistan, Turkmenistan begin work on long-delayed gas pipeline
Vedant Patel, Deputy Spokesperson for the US State Department, defended President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan during a press briefing.
The US Department of State, in response to a report by the House Foreign Affairs Committee regarding the withdrawal from Afghanistan, stated that although ending America’s longest war was not easy, it was a necessary action.
Vedant Patel, Deputy Spokesperson for the US State Department, defended President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan during a press briefing.
The Deputy Spokesperson told reporters: “when President Biden took office, he was faced with a choice: ramp up the war in Afghanistan and put more American troops at risk or finally end our involvement in America’s longest war after two decades of American president sending troops to fight and die in Afghanistan. we are stronger today because of this decision that President Biden made. The one that he made was the right one.”
Meanwhile, John Kirby, US National Security Council spokesman, described the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s report as one-sided and said that it has nothing new to offer.
Kirby said: “We’ve already issued comments about the one-sided, partisan nature of this report, so I’m not going to belabor that right now, but I do think a brief rundown of actual facts is important. First, on the very day this administration took office, the Taliban was in the strongest position it had been in years, and the Afghan government the weakest. The Trump administration cut a deal called the Doha Agreement that mandated a complete US withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
Idris Mohammadi Zazi, a political analyst, said: “The positive aspect was that Afghanistan became free and independent, and a central government was handed over to the Islamic Emirate.”
Earlier, CBS News reported that Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee have accused the Biden administration of misleading public opinion regarding the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The report also accused Zalmay Khalilzad of weakening the previous Afghan government by sidelining it from negotiations.
US State Dept Reaffirms Decision to Withdraw from Afghanistan
The twenty-year presence of the United States in Afghanistan was also costly for Washington.
September 11 was a significant global event that had extensive economic, political, and security repercussions for Afghanistan.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States and NATO member countries sent their military and economic forces to Afghanistan. The United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in 2001 under the banner of fighting terrorism and narcotics. This invasion led to the fall of the first rule of the Islamic Emirate and marked the beginning of a new era in Afghanistan’s political history.
Salim Paigir, a political analyst, said: “During the twenty years after the September 11 attacks, the Americans even used the Mother of All Bombs in Afghanistan. The Americans achieved no success in Afghanistan, and they failed in all three of their objectives—fighting terrorism, fighting narcotics, and state-building.”
Despite these international efforts, Afghanistan continued to face serious security and economic challenges. In the twenty years following September 11, Afghanistan witnessed the influx of billions of dollars in financial aid from the international community.
Sayad Akbar Sial Wardak, a political analyst, told TOLOnews: “The Islamic regime that existed was overthrown by the international community, and another system based on democratic values emerged in Afghanistan, bringing about significant changes in political, economic, and other sectors.”
The twenty-year presence of the United States in Afghanistan was also costly for Washington. Nearly 2,460 American soldiers were killed, and over 21,000 others were wounded.
Abdul Zuhoor Mudaber, an economic analyst, commented: “It is said that around four trillion dollars flowed into Afghanistan; however, unfortunately, it was not spent on a productive economy but rather on a consumptive one.”
Now, twenty-three years after the events of September 11 that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan, the Islamic Emirate has once again taken power in the country, with over three years passing since its re-establishment. Despite expanding its political and economic relations with regional and trans-regional countries, it has yet to be officially recognized by any country.
Afghanistan After 9/11: Two Decades of Intervention and Aftermath
More than 130 Afghan women have gathered in Albania at an All Afghan Women summit, in an attempt to develop a united voice representing the women and girls of Afghanistan in the fight against the ongoing assault on human rights by the Taliban.
Some women who attempted to reach the summit from inside Afghanistan were prevented from travelling, pulled off flights in Pakistan or stopped at borders. Other women have travelled from countries including Iran, Canada, the UK and the US where they are living as refugees. The summit, which has been two years in the making, is being hosted by the Albanian government in Tirana after multiple other governments across the region refused, said the organizers.
Fawzia Koofi, the women’s activist and former Afghan MP, whose organisation Women for Afghanistan arranged the summit, said: “In these three days, the women of Afghanistan from all backgrounds come together to unite their efforts on scenarios to change the current status quo at a time when women in Afghanistan say they are being completely erased from the public sphere.
“We aim to achieve consensus and strategise on how to make the Taliban accountable for the human rights violations they are perpetrating and how to improve the economic situation for women inside the country.”
The summit comes a few weeks after the Taliban published new “vice and virtue” laws that banned women’s voices being heard in public and made it mandatory for women to completely cover their bodies outside the home.
“Us being here together is an act of defiance. We will not be silenced,” said Seema Ghani, a former minister under the government of Hamid Karzai and now a women’s rights activist who has remained in Afghanistan to carry out humanitarian work. “Women and girls inside Afghanistan are living lives that are dominated by fear, every day. Just leaving the house is an ordeal.”
“The world is moving on but we are here, all of us together, to try to make sure that we are not forgotten. We are not all here to agree with each other, but we are here to talk, debate and hopefully end with a united voice,” said Ghani.
‘Frightening’ Taliban law bans women from speaking in public
At the end of the three-day summit, the organisers hope to publish a set of demands or guidelines for the international community that sets out how Afghan women want to respond to the systematic attack on their rights and freedom by the Taliban.
In the three years since the Taliban have taken control of Afghanistan, women have been barred from most forms of paid employment, prevented from walking in public parks and shut out of the criminal justice system, and girls have been stopped from going to secondary school or university. The Taliban have also resumed the stoning of women for crimes such as adultery.
A campaign for the Taliban’s treatment of women to be recognised as “gender apartheid” and a crime against humanity under international law was launched last year in an attempt to hold the group to account.
Afghan women meet in Albania in ‘act of defiance’ against Taliban crackdown
Meanwhile, the Harris campaign releases a new ad questioning Trump’s national security chops.
Three years after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Democrats and Republicans are launching a fresh wave of attacks and counterattacks on who is to blame for the debacle, all with an eye toward the November ballot.
The battle of the “who screwed up Afghanistan” narrative is playing out across Washington in the form of congressional investigations, cable news hits and statements from campaign proxies.
Republicans released a new investigation over the weekend, particularly well-timed for former President Donald Trump’s campaign ahead of Tuesday’s debate, that puts the blame for the way the U.S. departed Afghanistan squarely on President Joe Biden (and now Kamala Harris).
“The administration’s unconditional surrender and the abandonment of our Afghan allies, who fought alongside the U.S. military against the Taliban — their brothers in arms — is a stain on this administration,” said Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who led the investigation. “I will use every tool in my belt to compel both men to answer for the catastrophic failure of epic proportions their decisions caused.”
On Monday, a group of 10 former top U.S. military commanders shot back with an open letter defending Harris’ foreign policy credentials and accusing Trump of a “chaotic approach” to Afghanistan that “severely hindered” the Biden administration’s withdrawal options when it entered office. Trump originally set a deadline to withdraw all U.S. troops from the country in 2021 as part of a deal with the Taliban that also included the release of 5,000 Taliban fighters from prison. Biden panned the deal, but after he was elected followed through with the full withdrawal plan.
“We believed it was important to write this because we wanted to counter lies” put forward by the Trump campaign and Republican lawmakers on Afghanistan, said Randy Manner, a retired U.S. Army general who signed the letter.
For Republicans, just getting the Afghanistan withdrawal back into the news is a win — as it highlights one of the highest-profile failures in American foreign policy that ended on Biden’s watch, regardless of where the fault for the final phase of the war lies.
When Trump and Harris face off Tuesday, the fact that Afghanistan has been pushed back into the political news cycle makes it more likely it could come up as a topic.
Republicans are increasingly hammering Harris’s role in the policy. “The Afghanistan withdrawal will go down as one of the most embarrassing moments in American history, all thanks to Kamala’s incompetence,” Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
The Democrats shoot back that it was Trump before he left office that set the stage for the chaotic withdrawal, and that ultimately, Team Biden made the right call to end an otherwise endless war and focus on bigger threats like Russia and China.
“Americans are no longer fighting and dying in Afghanistan, and we’re now no longer spending tens of billions of dollars a month to fight a war that could not be won,” said Rep. Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat and Army veteran of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
The State Department issued a lengthy rebuttal to McCaul’s report on Monday, alleging that over the course of its investigation, the Republican House majority “issued partisan statements, cherry-picked facts, withheld testimonies from the American people, and obfuscated the truth behind conjecture.”
“We will not stand by silently as the department and its workforce are used to further partisan agendas,” the department said.
McCaul has hit the airwaves in network and cable news hits to outline the findings of his three-year investigation, and Trump campaign surrogates are still touting the former president’s ties with Gold Star families of U.S. service members killed in Afghanistan, despite the controversy surrounding his recent visit to Arlington National Cemetery.
Harris’ campaign is lashing out at the Republican presidential contender on national security in a new campaign ad featuring former top Trump officials such as former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper saying he isn’t fit to be commander in chief.
But Harris also has a line to walk between showing that she has been a key player in foreign policy decisions over the past four years, without being hit by criticism over how some of those Biden decisions played out. It’s unclear whether Harris will fight back and hammer Trump on his own Afghanistan strategy in the debate on Tuesday, or try to shift the narrative to other foreign policy issues.
The Harris campaign unveiled a new policy section on her website Monday ahead of the debate including a section on foreign policy, proclaiming that Harris is “ready to be commander in chief on day one.”
The ad cites Harris’s roles on Russia, Ukraine, the Indo-Pacific, Israel and Gaza, and NATO. The website makes no mention of Afghanistan.
Republicans work to put Afghanistan at center of election cycle
The report, following two years of investigation, was criticized as “nakedly partisan” by Democrats who were unmoved by its lack of new insights.
The Republican leadership of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Sundayreleased a sprawling report on the U.S. exit from Afghanistan three years ago, blasting President Joe Biden and his administration as the callous and “dogmatic” orchestrator of a foreign policy failure so extreme that it ranked “far worse” than even America’s catastrophic withdrawal from Vietnamin 1975.
Democrats swiftly dismissed the 240-page report, the product of a two-year GOP investigation, as “nakedly partisan” and as the cynical manipulation of tragedy for use as a “political football.”
The document arrives just two months ahead of a tightly contested presidential election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, and on the eve of their highly anticipated debate Tuesday in Philadelphia. Both parties said the timing of its release was intended to underscore Republicans’ recent efforts to revive public scrutiny of the withdrawal, which the committee’s chairman, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), suggested could “disqualify” Harris in the minds of voters.
The committee has said as well that even with the report’s publication, its work will continue with the pursuit of additional witness testimony.
It was Trump, as president in February 2020, who negotiated the oft-criticized deal, known as the Doha agreement, with Afghanistan’s Taliban militant group to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners and withdraw all U.S. forces the following year.
In recent weeks, though, he has aggressively defended his decision to cut a deal while seeking to draw voters’ attention instead to the chaos that ensuedin Kabul during August 2021, as Biden executed the agreement and brought America’s longest war to a messy and violent end.Trump last week accused Biden and Harris of bearing responsibility for the suicide bomb attack during the withdrawal that killed 13 U.S. service members “just like they pulled the trigger.”
But while the GOP report contains some minor new details, there are no major revelations that go beyond prior reporting already in the public domain via separate investigations conducted by the Defense Department, the State Department, news outlets and analysts, as well as the foreign affairs committee itself. And it contains no evidence that Harris played a major role in the withdrawal’s execution.
The report focuses intently on the chaotic and desperate noncombatant evacuation operation (NEO), a three-week crisis marred by images of horror as Afghans trying to escape the Taliban’s return to power died amid the crush of desperate crowds, while clinging to departing U.S. planes and in the suicide bombing just outside Kabul’s airport.
Among its findings that the committee emphasized were revelations first publicized months ago, such as the evacuation request coming on the day the Taliban entered Afghanistan’s capital, and one diplomat’s assertion that the U.S. Embassy’s top official had violated covid-19 protocols.
But the report stops short of presenting significant new evidence about the airport attack, an event Republicans have portrayed as the most egregious of Biden’s failures in overseeing the withdrawal. “Debate over whether the Abbey Gate attack was a lone suicide bomber or a complex attack, including gunfire after the bomb, has yet to be resolved,” the report says, citing a lack of aerial surveillance at the time of the attack, and the destruction of evidence by the Defense Department in the aftermath. A person familiar with the Defense Department’s investigation of the bombing said previously that it is true some photographs snapped by a sniper team overseeing the bombing site went missing.
And the report does not fulfill the GOP’s larger promise of accountability to the aggrieved families of the 13 slain Americans, some of whom appeared onstage at the Republican National Convention to show their support for Trump, who has shown them compassion and vowed transparency in ways that they say Biden has not.
“All they want — they want a phone call or a meeting from Harris or from Biden to say, ‘We know we did things wrong. It didn’t go well. And we are taking those lessons into account so that it never happens again,’” said Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), an Afghanistan war veteran who serves on the foreign affairs committee.
It’s unclear how deeply voters will consider the Afghanistan withdrawal when they cast their votes in November, and whether they are willing to link the catastrophic exit to Harris, whom Trump and McCaul have endeavored to cast as a critical decision-maker.
Within the pages of the report, “Biden-Harris administration” appears repeatedly — an adjustment that the committee’s Republican staff said it made in the final weeks of drafting the document. Yet there is scant mention of her as an individual, with the committee appearing to conclude that her most damaging behavior during the withdrawal was her absence of dissent.
“With the ascendance of Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, the GOP performance has reached a crescendo — Republicans now claim she was the architect of the U.S. withdrawal though she is referenced only three times in 3,288 pages of the Committee’s interview transcripts,” the panel’s Democrats said in a memorandum released simultaneously with the Republican report.
The Harris campaign said in a statement ahead of the report’s release that “Trump gave the Taliban everything they wanted,” referring to the Doha agreement. “Despite the deal’s drastic implications for U.S. military strategy and the safety of U.S. troops and allies, Trump left the Biden-Harris Administration with zero plans for an orderly withdrawal — only a dangerous, costly mess.”
The report’s larger conclusions are unsurprising. It pins the failures of the war’s endgame squarely on the Biden administration, which it says “prioritized the optics of the withdrawal over the security of U.S. personnel on the ground.” The administration’s last-minute move to organize the mass evacuation of noncombatants — largely Afghans who had worked in support of the U.S. mission — “created an unsafe environment” at Kabul’s airport, it says, ultimately resulting in the deaths of 13 service members.
“The Biden-Harris administration knew such an attack was not only possible but likely, yet they still failed to take the appropriate measure to mitigate the risk,” the report states.
What’s more, the report charges, Biden was determined to withdraw — regardless of the cost, the warnings from his generals or the apparent deterioration of security as the Taliban steadily gained ground. It also says officials“misled and, in some instances, directly lied to the American people at every stage of the withdrawal,” and accuses the entire administration of a vast “cover-up” led in large part by the White House National Security Council.
Sharon Yang, a White House spokesperson, characterized the GOP’s report as a “recycled, partisan” attack. “The fact remains,” she said in a statement, “that ending our longest war was the right thing to do and our nation is stronger today as a result.”
Republicans argue otherwise. The aftermath of the withdrawal has degraded U.S. national security and U.S. credibility on the world stage, as Afghanistan has again become “a haven for terrorists,” the report alleges, while America’s Afghan allies who were left behind have faced imprisonment, torture and murder at the hands of the Taliban. The chaotic exit “created a tidal wave of problems in Afghanistan, the United States, and around the world,” the report says, leaving billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. weapons and currency behind to the Taliban. And it “created a crisis within the U.S. military and among American veterans,” underminingrecruitment and retention, it claims.
The report allots little space to the 19 years of war and policy decisions that came before the 2021 withdrawal, including under two Republican administrations. That task falls to the bipartisan congressionally mandated Afghanistan War Commission, which will deliver its own comprehensive report in 2026.
Democrats on Sunday panned the new report and noted the total absence of Democratic involvement in its drafting. “It is a politicized, cherry-picked report … a nakedly partisan campaign thing,” the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Jim Himes (Conn.), said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.” That is all it was “designed to do,” Himes said — “not shed light on a tragedy.”
The foreign affairs committee’s Democratic staff, led by Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (D-N.Y.), produced a 56-page document that largely echoes the administration’s previous defense of its handling of the evacuation. It highlights, for instance, that when the evacuation was over,“the Biden Administration had facilitated the largest humanitarian airlift in U.S. history and ended the United States’ longest war” — a rosy gloss on an endeavor that left thousands of Afghan allies and their families behind.
Meeks, in a letter to fellow Democrats, characterized the Republicans’ report as having excluded “anything unhelpful to a predetermined, partisan narrative” and said their GOP colleagues took “particular pains to avoid facts involving former president Trump.”
Asked on “Face the Nation” whether the GOP’s investigation identified any “mistakes by the Trump administration,” McCaul singled out Zalmay Khalilzad, the envoy Trump dispatched to negotiate the withdrawal with the Taliban. The report heaps ample blame on him while seemingly excusing Trump from Khalilzad’s decision-making.
Khalilzad responded to some of the report’s allegations against him, including the chargethat he kept military leaders in the dark during U.S.-Taliban negotiations. “That is factually incorrect,” Khalilzad wrote on social media. “Far from having been kept in the dark, the military … fully participated in the negotiations with the Taliban.” He cited the direct involvement of Gen. Mark A. Milley, then the chairmanof the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, who was the top commander in Afghanistan at the time of the Doha talks.“No agreement was made on any military issue without the full knowledge of our military leaders and their participation in decisions made by our leaders,” Khalilzad asserted.
He also pushed back on the report’s claim that he personally excluded the Afghan government from the negotiations, writing that the Afghan government and the Taliban were never able to reach a “mutual agreement on a new government” and that “there was widespread pessimism” among U.S. officials “that the Afghan leaders would put their country first and seek a realistic compromise.”
For his part, Trump, in 2021, celebrated Biden’s decision to stick with the withdrawal agreement his administration made with the Taliban — “Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do,” he said at the time — and in the weeks before the Afghan government’s collapse, he touted how he’d made it difficult for Biden to do anything other than follow through with the withdrawal he put in motion.
“They couldn’t stop the process,” he said at a political rally in June of that year, referring to the Biden administration. “Twenty-one years is enough, don’t we think?” he continued, overstating the length of the conflict by a year. “ … They couldn’t stop the process. They wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process.”
Danielle Douglas-Gabriel and Marianna Sotomayor contributed to this report.
GOP probe of Afghanistan exit rips Biden, labors to implicate Harris
The United Nations says aid workers are still in a “race against time” to remove rubble and rebuild after the devastating earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan last month, killing at least 2,200 people and cutting off remote areas.
The 6.0-magnitude quake on Aug. 31 was shallow, destroying or causing extensive damage to low-rise buildings in the mountainous region. It hit late at night, and homes — mostly made of mud, wood, or rocks — collapsed instantly, becoming death traps.
Satellite data shows that about 40,500 truckloads of debris still needs to be cleared from affected areas in several provinces, the United Nations Development Program said Wednesday. Entire communities have been upended and families are sleeping in the open, it added.
The quake’s epicenter was in remote and rugged Kunar province, challenging rescue and relief efforts by the Taliban government and humanitarian groups. Authorities deployed helicopters or airdropped army commandos to evacuate survivors. Aid workers walked for hours on foot to reach isolated communities.
“This is a race against time,” said Devanand Ramiah, from the UNDP’s Crisis Bureau. “Debris removal and reconstruction operations must start safely and swiftly.”
People’s main demands were the reconstruction of houses and water supplies, according to a spokesman for a Taliban government committee tasked with helping survivors, Zia ur Rahman Speenghar.
People were getting assistance in cash, food, tents, beds, and other necessities, Speenghar said Thursday. Three new roads were under construction in the Dewagal Valley, and roads would be built to areas where there previously were none.
“Various countries and organizations have offered assistance in the construction of houses but that takes time. After the second round of assistance, work will begin on the third round, which is considering what kind of houses can be built here,” the spokesman said.
Afghanistan is facing a “perfect storm” of crises, including natural disasters like the recent earthquake, said Roza Otunbayeva, who leads the U.N. mission to the country.
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
