Why I Resigned In Protest From The House Committee Investigating Biden’s Afghanistan Debacle
Those responsible aren’t being held accountable, and the right lessons aren’t being learned. The American people deserve better.
The Federalist
Aug 13, 2024
Taliban fighters take control of the Afghan presidential palace in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 15, 2021.
Dear Chairman McCaul,
I wish to provide a formal explanation for my resignation from my
position as a senior investigator for the House Foreign Affairs
Committee’s investigation into the Biden-Harris Administration’s
disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. My resignation is
effective today. I am grateful for being asked to serve in this role for
the past year.
I believe the Committee’s work has been important and the
investigation has repeatedly uncovered evidence further solidifying the
undeniable fact that the dangerous decision by President Biden — one
strongly supported by Vice President Harris — to fully and rapidly pull
out all U.S. troops from Afghanistan with no plan for how to deal with
the inevitable fallout was a deadly disaster. The investigation has
further reinforced that the Biden-Harris Administration’s cascade of bad
decisions in 2021 led to the Afghan government’s collapse, the
Taliban’s conquest of the country, the deaths of 13 U.S. service members
at Abbey Gate, the abandonment of hundreds of Americans and tens of
thousands of Afghan allies, and a rise in terrorism — and the
investigation has reinforced the fact that the Biden-Harris
Administration’s disaster has led to a more dangerous world.
People
running alongside a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane as it moved
down a runway of the international airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan on
August 16, 2021.
Even as I applaud the Committee’s successes, many of which have come
because of your continued leadership on this issue, I must also
recognize and highlight the investigation’s faults, particularly the
missed opportunities resulting from the Committee’s unwillingness or
inability to pursue critical testimony and from its failure to go down
key investigative avenues. I believe this has done a great disservice to
the Committee’s mission statement. And I believe that the quest for
truth desired by the American people, and more tragically by the Gold
Star families, has been hurt by this investigative paralysis.
When I was asked to join the Committee as a senior investigator after
reporting on and writing a book on the debacle in Afghanistan, I made
it clear that I believed the Committee’s investigation should be
sweeping in scope and should pursue every lead possible. I was told by
you, Mr. Chairman, as well as by senior staff, that everyone was in
agreement on this. My view, then and now, was that the Biden-Harris
withdrawal from Afghanistan was a diplomatic failure, an intelligence
failure, a military failure, a strategic failure, a policy failure, a
planning failure, a political failure, a truth-telling failure, and a
moral failure — but above all a leadership failure by President Biden.
And I believe that all aspects of that failure should be investigated.
Yet my efforts to fully pursue investigative leads have been
repeatedly stymied by our chief investigator and by senior staff, and,
unfortunately, sometimes by indecision from you, Mr. Chairman. What I am
about to lay out should not be considered comprehensive — it is merely
meant to highlight a number of ways in which I believe the Committee has
allowed members of the Biden-Harris Administration to avoid deserved
scrutiny. I am writing this not to criticize the Committee, but to help
the Committee see the flaws in its investigation so it can take
advantage of the remaining months left in the 118th Congress.
While the Committee has interviewed an impressive number of State
Department witnesses and has extracted devastating testimony from them,
there has been a repeated refusal to ask to interview a number of key
high-ranking witnesses from that Department, despite my urging. Those
who have been allowed to escape such scrutiny include: Ambassador Tracey
Jacobson, then the State Department Afghanistan Coordination Task Force
and now the nominee to become Ambassador to Iraq; Wendy Sherman, the
now-former Deputy Secretary of State; and Victoria Nuland, the
now-former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. There are
also a number of key State Department documents that our Committee has
refused to request despite my repeated urging. All of these interviews
and documents should still be requested.
My repeated and monthslong requests to pursue testimony from Russ
Travers (the now-former Senior Deputy Homeland Security Advisor for the
NSC who was a signer of the Hunter Biden laptop letter and played a key
role in the Biden-Harris Administration’s failed handling of the SIV
process) and from USAID Administrator Samantha Power have also been
rejected. The Committee should still seek to bring these witnesses in.
For months, I have also repeatedly requested that the Committee
pursue transcribed interviews with key military figures such as Rear
Admiral Vasely, Major General Chris Donahue, Brigadier General Farrell
Sullivan, TRANSCOM Commander General Stephen Lyons, and Army Major
General Curtis Buzzard — but this has also not happened. I have also
requested that we pursue testimony from other key U.S. military figures
and U.S. service members who could also shed further light on the NEO,
on U.S. interactions with the Taliban, and on the Abbey Gate bombing,
but this has similarly never happened. I have compiled dozens of
questions that military commanders should be asked. I have also laid out
a host of documents that we should request from the Pentagon — a
request similarly rejected or ignored by senior staff. All of these
witnesses and documents should still be requested.
Despite your public vows as Chairman to the Abbey Gate Gold Star
families, and despite our private promises to the families, the
Committee has failed to properly investigate all aspects of the ISIS-K
suicide bombing and of the U.S. reliance on the Taliban to provide
security at HKIA during the NEO. I believe that CENTCOM’s initial
investigation and supplemental review of the Abbey Gate bombing, while
revealing some key facts and riveting testimony, also contained
conclusions which were not fully supported by the facts or were
otherwise designed to deflect blame or whitewash what had happened.
CENTCOM provided the Committee with a Member-level briefing on its
supplemental Abbey Gate review in a classified space — meaning little,
if any, of the info gleaned can be made public. I have repeatedly argued
that the CENTCOM investigators should provide an unclassified and
transcribed briefing on the Abbey Gate bombing — and that I and others
be allowed to press them on a host of unresolved questions — but this
request for a publicly-accessible Q&A session was never pursued by
our chief investigator nor by senior staff. For many months, I have
pressed our chief investigator to send CENTCOM and the Department of
Defense a list of dozens of detailed questions on the NEO, the Abbey
Gate bombing, the U.S. military’s reliance upon the Taliban to provide
security at HKIA, intelligence on ISIS-K, and much more — but my
requests have been rejected.
While writing my book and subsequently serving on this Committee, I
have come to know and respect many of the Gold Star families and a
number of the U.S. troops who bravely and heroically served on the
ground during the NEO. As Chairman, you made promises to the Gold Star
families about relentlessly pursuing answers for them, and as Committee
staff we made private promises to the families echoing the same. The
Committee’s investigation simply has not lived up to those promises. But
it is not too late to ask the questions and bring in the witnesses that
I have repeatedly suggested.
The House Armed Services Committee has failed to investigate these
matters itself, and has often been slow and reluctant to assist our own
Committee, but that is no excuse for inaction on our part.
Additionally, I believe that the Committee’s agreement to interview
Lieutenant Colonel Brad Whited (a key military officer during the NEO in
August 2021) in a classified setting with no transcription of the
conversation caused instant confusion and disagreement afterward about
some of what the military officer had even said. Without a record of the
exchange, the contents of his testimony may never be fully known, and
the classified setting also limits what can be shared publicly.
I have also advocated for months that our Committee team up with
other Committees on joint letters related to the debacle in Afghanistan.
I proposed a joint letter with House Oversight related to who was
evacuated during the NEO, vetting procedures, and other topics; a joint
letter with House Judiciary on the FBI’s purported investigation into
the Abbey Gate bombing and into the Abbey Gate bomber; and a joint
letter with House Intel to request the U.S. intelligence products from
2021 which assessed the sustainability of the Afghan government, the
likelihood of a Taliban takeover, and a host of other subjects. All of
my proposals here were ignored or rejected by our chief investigator.
Nevertheless, the Committee should still pursue these.
I believe the Committee has also erred in its approach to some of the
State Department witnesses that we did bring in — including repeatedly
not including key questions that I proposed for these witnesses (while
almost always failing to provide any explanation for why these questions
were cut) and failing to properly follow-up on holding these witnesses
accountable.
After conducting a transcribed interview with Ambassador Ross Wilson,
the final U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, I strongly believed that
Wilson should be brought in for a full public hearing, given the
multitude of failures he was responsible for after being retained in his
position by President Biden. Initially, there was agreement within the
Committee to bring him in for a hearing, but then senior staff reversed
themselves. Eventually, I was told by our chief investigator that
bringing in Ross Wilson would make us look like bullies. I could not
disagree more; Ambassador Wilson had more than earned his time in the
hot seat in front of Congress, and a public accounting is not bullying.
The Committee can and should still bring him in for a hearing.
After conducting a transcribed interview with Zalmay Khalilzad, the
former Special Representative for Afghan Reconciliation, it became
clearer than ever to me how dishonest Khalilzad continued to be about
the nature of the Taliban and about his actions as a negotiator in Doha.
But in the lead up to the follow-on public hearing, our chief
investigator briefed congressional staff that Khalilzad had been the
most honest of all the witnesses we had interviewed up until then — a
statement I found as alarming as it was untrue. Unfortunately, this gave
the strong (and wrong) impression to congressional staff that Khalilzad
was a friendly witness, a misleading view likely passed along to their
Members. This is not the reality regarding Khalilzad. All evidence
indicates that Zal is in it for Zal. For the title of the Khalilzad
hearing, I suggested ideas such as “Trusting the Taliban” or “The
Disaster in Doha” with the goal of highlighting Khalilzad’s role in the
debacle. Instead, the Committee went with “Behind the Scenes: How the
Biden Administration Failed to Enforce the Doha Agreement.” As I
explained at the time, this hearing name would set the wrong tone for
questioning, falsely suggesting that Khalilzad bore little
responsibility for the catastrophe. It also alarmingly cast the deeply
flawed Doha Agreement in a favorable light, rather than using the
opportunity to rightly critique the Biden-Harris Administration’s
bizarre decision to not only retain the architect of that bad deal but
to also double down and put him in charge of ever more high-stakes
diplomacy with the Taliban — a decision which ended with the Taliban in
charge of Afghanistan. It is true the Biden-Harris Administration
utterly failed to enforce even the meager provisions of the Doha deal,
even as the Taliban violated each provision, but the hearing with
Khalilzad should have been much broader in scope.
The Committee’s framing, in my view, treated Khalilzad gently, when
instead the goal should have been to highlight Khalilzad’s mendacity and
to hammer the Biden-Harris Administration for keeping him in his
diplomatic perch despite his obvious failings in dealing with the
Taliban. I believe this made the hearing far less effective than it
should have been.
Additionally, an anecdote from moments after the hearing illustrates
what I see as the flawed direction of the Committee’s investigation.
Just after Khalilzad finished testifying, our chief investigator went up
to him on the floor of the hearing room and asked for (and received) a
smiling selfie with him in full view of the press and the public — with
veterans of the war in Afghanistan and Gold Star families still in the
hearing room audience. Given what I and a multitude of others believe to
be Khalilzad’s significant role in the end of the Afghan republic, I
found such a move to be highly inappropriate and potentially harmful to
the optics surrounding our investigation.
After the hearing, I repeatedly urged our chief investigator to send Khalilzad a
specific QFR related to a false claim he had made that the Taliban had
cooperated with the United States fully during the evacuation — a claim
contradicted by a host of evidence, including General McKenzie himself
publicly admitting that the U.S. military repeatedly asked the Taliban
to search or raid ISIS-K locations during the NEO, with the Taliban
sometimes refusing to do so. I believe this QFR was never sent. Despite
months passing, the Committee should still send Khalilzad the QFR that I
suggested. And I can only urge the Committee to ensure its final report
reflects the clear evidence showing Khalilzad’s destructive failures in
2020 and 2021.
As I expressed repeatedly throughout the process, I also have serious
problems with the way that the eventual public hearing with General
Milley and General McKenzie was handled. From the start, I made it clear
that these men held a large amount of knowledge and information that
only they were privy to. I advocated for bringing them both in for
individual transcribed interviews and then holding separate public
hearings with them. Instead, after pushback from the generals, you as
Chairman made an initial agreement that would have allowed the men to
appear together and only in a classified space — meaning that, if that
plan had been realized, little to none of what they would tell the
Committee could ever have been made public. After pushback from the Gold
Star families (and from me), you wisely relented and the Committee
eventually held a joint public hearing with the two men. But the lack of
individual transcribed interviews or even individual public hearings
meant that what we were able to get out of the hearing was limited by
time constraints.
Other self-inflicted problems with the Milley-McKenzie hearing soon
arose, especially with further special accommodations we made for the
generals. The hearing was initially announced with one of the hearing
titles I had proposed and that you as Chairman had signed off on: “A
‘Strategic Failure’: Biden’s Withdrawal, America’s Generals, and the
Taliban Takeover.” But, in a stunning accommodation for witnesses and an
adjustment that is without precedent as far as I know, the Committee
agreed to change the hearing title after General Milley reached out to
complain that the title would cast some blame on him for the debacle.
Although U.S. military commanders absolutely offered more accurate
assessments of the risks of a full withdrawal in 2021 than those
presented by incompetent State Department officials or the NSC, the top
military brass is not blameless for what ultimately transpired. But
following General Milley’s complaints, the Committee agreed to modify a
hearing title which had already been announced, changing it to “An
Assessment of the Biden Administration’s Withdrawal from Afghanistan by
America’s Generals” — wording that clearly signaled the generals bore
little to no responsibility for the disaster that unfolded.
Additionally, the Committee allowed the generals to break the
Committee’s typical practice of having witnesses submit written
testimony prior to the hearing. General Milley did not end up submitting
his written testimony until many days after the hearing, and as far as I
can tell, General McKenzie never ended up submitting any written
testimony at all (despite releasing a book months later which included
multiple chapters on Afghanistan).
One further anecdote from the Milley-McKenzie saga is illustrative of
the way this investigation has unfortunately been run. General Milley
offered to speak with Gold Star family members in person in a side room
just before the public hearing, and General McKenzie said he was willing
to do so as well. The Committee initially agreed we would have at least
one staff member in the room during this conversation between the
generals and the families, something the generals were fine with and the
families desired. The families then articulated they wanted me
specifically in the room with them during their talk with the generals.
It was at that point that my superiors suddenly decided that we would
not allow any of our staff in the room after all, denying the Committee a
chance to support the Gold Star families and listen to their discussion
with Milley and McKenzie.
For the hearing, I proposed a host of questions to be presented to
Members as suggestions to pose to General Milley and General McKenzie,
but many of them were cut by our chief investigator. Months ago,
immediately after the hearing, I proposed sending a long series of QFRs
to General Milley and General McKenzie, so that we could do our due
diligence and still try to get as many answers as possible about the
withdrawal and the NEO. Despite my repeated insistence that we send
these QFRs to the generals, it never happened. Even though months have
lapsed since the hearing, the Committee should still send General Milley
and General McKenzie those QFRs. And I again simply urge the Committee
to hold the generals accountable for their own significant mistakes, and
to document their failings in the Committee’s final report.
Finally, I have argued repeatedly that Vice President Kamala Harris
should be held accountable for her role in the debacle in Afghanistan,
especially now that she is the Democratic nominee for President of the
United States and could soon be making national security decisions and
directing foreign policy for our entire nation. Thus far, despite my
urging, the Committee has taken zero steps to do so, and I have received
pushback from my superiors related to taking action on this.
The record is clear that Vice President Harris says she was involved
in President Biden’s disastrous decision-making in 2021, including
bragging that she was the last person in the room when President Biden
made his foolish Go-to-Zero decision. Despite this, my proposal to
question White House press secretary Jen Psaki on the issue of Harris’s
involvement was rejected when our chief investigator did not include my
related proposed questions in our question outline when we brought Psaki
in last month. (Notably, Psaki was the first fact witness brought
before our Committee since Harris assumed the mantle of Democratic
presidential nominee.) I will also note that my proposed questions
related to Psaki’s knowledge about President Biden’s lack of mental
fitness for the job were also cut at the insistence of a senior
communications staffer.
My other proposals that would attempt to hold Harris accountable,
which have been repeatedly submitted to my superiors on the Committee,
have been straightforward:
- As the Chairman, you should put out a press release criticizing her
for her role in the fiasco. I urged this immediately upon Biden’s
announcement that he would not be running for reelection and have urged
it repeatedly since then, but for reasons unknown this hasn’t happened.
- As Chairman, you should lead a House resolution condemning her for her role.
- The Committee should send the Vice President a lengthy list of
probing questions pressing her on her role in the decision-making
process related to Afghanistan throughout 2021.
- The Committee should request transcribed interviews with her top
advisers at the time, including: Nancy Eileen McEldowney, Harris’s
national security adviser at the time; Philip Gordon, Harris’s deputy
national security adviser at the time and now her national security
adviser; Hartina “Tina” Flournoy, Harris’s chief of staff at the time;
Michael Fuchs, Harris’s deputy chief of staff at the time; Symone
Sanders-Townsend, Harris’s chief spokesperson and senior advisor at the
time; Ashley Etienne, Harris’s communications director at the time; and
Sabrina Singh, Harris’s deputy press secretary at the time and now
deputy Pentagon press secretary.
The Committee’s failure to quickly begin holding Vice President
Harris accountable for the part she played is befuddling and is more
troubling than just being plain bad politics — this is about
accountability for the person who desires to be our next
Commander-in-Chief even after she, along with President Biden, played a
key role in America’s embarrassing retreat and defeat in a twenty-year
war. If she is elected, she might be newly emboldened by the belief that
her poor decisions and failed actions are without consequences. The
disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal is likely to be only a harbinger of
the more reckless foreign policy that is to come under a potential
Harris-Walz Administration if this matter is not vigorously pursued
immediately. Harris simply cannot be allowed to skate on this — and yet,
so far, she is indeed skating.
I repeat my thanks at the opportunity to work on this investigation
for the Committee, and I offer my compliments to you and the Committee
for the efforts that have been undertaken to expose the malfeasance of
President Biden’s handling of the withdrawal and evacuation from
Afghanistan. Nonetheless, I must also repeat my disappointment with the
Committee’s failure to properly and fully hold the Biden-Harris
Administration accountable for its failures in 2021 and for the fallout
which followed.
I will continue to advocate for answers and accountability because I
believe we owe it to the Abbey Gate families, to all Gold Star families,
to all the U.S. service members who fought and died over the course of
the two-decade war, and to the American public. I fear that America has
not learned the lessons from its defeat in the two-decade war in
Afghanistan — and I worry that the lack of lessons-learned puts our
country in a precarious position in this era of renewed Great Power
competition. It was my hope that the Committee’s investigation would aid
in the learning of these critical lessons — and that hope remains.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Sincerely,
Jerry Dunleavy
Senior Investigator – House Foreign Affairs Committee
August 9, 2024
Jerry Dunleavy is a former Justice Department and investigative reporter
for the Washington Examiner, the co-author of “Kabul: The Untold Story
of Biden’s Fiasco and the American Warriors Who Fought to the End,” and a
former senior investigator with the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s
investigation into the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
1 comment:
Yup. It is long.
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