Hawley proposes select committee on ‘disastrous’ Afghanistan withdrawal
Sen. Josh Hawley introduced a bill Wednesday that would create a select committee in the U.S. Senate to investigate the rushed 2021 U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, in an attempt to highlight the Biden administration’s foreign policy blunder.
The Missouri Republican’s bill would create a bipartisan, 20-member committee to investigate the administration’s failures to get people out quickly enough and claims that the administration did not properly vet Afghan refugees. The committee would have subpoena power.
The bill is unlikely to go anywhere in the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate, but it marks the type of investigation the Biden administration will face if Republicans win control of Congress this year. Already, Republicans have promised to make Dr. Anthony Fauci, the retiring director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testify before Congress and have promised an investigation into the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.
“Joe Biden is desperate to evade responsibility for his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, but the American people deserve better,” Hawley said in a press release. “They deserve to know why the Administration ignored warnings that Kabul could collapse, why they delayed evacuating Americans until it was too late, and why they failed to protect our service members or even vet Afghan evacuees before they came to the United States.”
Hawley was supportive of the Trump administration’s plan to remove U.S. troops from Afghanistan, but has been a frequent critic of the actual withdrawal, as the Taliban was able to seize territory quicker than U.S. intelligence analysts predicted.
The Taliban’s advance led to a frantic withdrawal effort by U.S. troops that produced images evoking the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Amid the frantic push to get people out of the airport, a suicide bomber killed 13 U.S. troops near the Kabul airport and more than 100 Afghans.
For the past year and a half, Hawley has slowed the nominations of several of Biden’s nominees to the Department of Defense and the State Department, saying there has been no accountability over the withdrawal and that he would not stop slowing down nominees until Secretaries Lloyd Austin and Antony Blinken resign.
Democrats have criticized Hawley for blocking the nominees, saying it has jeopardized domestic security. In a floor speech that quickly spread through the internet in April, Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said Hawley’s request was unreasonable.
“That is not how this world works,” Schatz said. “That is not a reasonable request from a U.S. senator, that until the Secretary of Defense quits his job, I’m going to block all of his nominees? That’s preposterous.”
