[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 165 (Thursday, September 23, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6661-S6663]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                              Nominations

  Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am glad that we are coming to some 
conclusion this evening with respect to a handful of the long list of 
pending nominations for the State Department and the Department of 
Defense, but it is a small portion of a list that is growing bigger and 
bigger.
  Never before has a first-term President had this few national 
security nominees in place by the fall of his first year. And this is a 
growing national security crisis imposed on the country by Republicans 
who have decided to put their hatred of Democrats and this President 
ahead of the security of this country--above the security of this 
Nation.
  And it just takes a lot of hutzpah for my colleagues to stand here on 
the floor and criticize the President's conduct of foreign policy at 
the same time that they are refusing to allow the President to have 
staff to conduct foreign policy. Let me say that again. We have all 
sorts of Republicans coming down here and savaging the President's 
policy on Afghanistan or on China or on Russia, but then, at the exact 
same time, taking extraordinary steps to prevent the President from 
having anybody actually implement policies toward Afghanistan or Russia 
or China. It is akin to standing up in a restaurant and complaining 
about how slow the service is right after you went and barricaded the 
doors in and out of the kitchen.
  My colleagues can't have it both ways. If you want to complain about 
the President's policies toward China, then stop standing in the way of 
allowing him to have personnel that can execute on sound policy. Stop 
standing in the way of the Assistant Secretary who will oversee policy 
in the region.
  You have complaints about Afghanistan. Then why are we continuing to 
block those who would be in charge of refugee policy and in charge of 
resettlement policy to get more Afghans out of the country?
  You have complaints about Russia. Well, for a month Republicans have 
been blocking the key personnel who oversee policy toward Russia, 
whether it be the Assistant Secretary for Europe or our Ambassador to 
NATO.
  Here is what voters are left to wonder: Are these sincere objections 
based upon policy or is this really about an intentional effort to try 
to undermine the security of this country in order to damage Joe Biden?
  I don't know the answer to that question, but I can't figure out any 
plausible reason how this benefits the country. Never before--never 
before--has a minority gone to these lengths to try to undermine a 
President's national security team.
  Every single Democrat had massive objections, moral and practical, to 
President Trump's foreign policy, but not a single one of us 
contemplated doing what our Republican colleagues are doing right now--
holding up every single one of Donald Trump's Ambassadors and 
nominees--because we knew that that would undermine the security of the 
country, because there are differences that we have, but there are far 
more points of agreement where midlevel civil servants and Ambassadors 
are carrying out policies on behalf of America that Republicans and 
Democrats agree on.

  Here is the list of nominees that are stuck. What does the Chief of 
Protocol have to do with Nord Stream 2? What does the Ambassador to 
Vietnam have to do with the objections of the Senator from Texas over 
an oil pipeline? Why are we blocking the Assistant Administrator for 
the U.S. Agency for International Development?
  Nothing that is happening here has anything to do with the security 
of this country.
  So I am glad we are unlocking a handful of nominees, but we are going 
to be here on Thursdays and Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays. I am 
going to advocate that we stay as long as it takes in order to protect 
this country, in order to stop this unprecedented blockade of the 
people who do the work of standing up for the security of this Nation 
every single day.
  One of the critiques that has been lodged here today is about the 
President's proposal and his execution of his proposal to wind down the 
20-year war in Afghanistan. In fact, one of my colleagues said that 
until the Secretary of State resigns, he will continue to block all 
Department of Defense and State Department nominees, knowing that that 
is not going to happen.
  So I do want to spend a few minutes this evening talking about the 
real story behind President Biden's decision to bring a 20-year war 
that has cost this country $2 trillion, has cost this Nation thousands 
of lives, and has ended up in hundreds of thousands of Afghans being 
killed--let's just be very clear at the outset. President Biden's 
decision to bring U.S. troops home from Afghanistan is wildly popular--
supported by three out of four Americans. And I want to talk about the 
danger of what has happened over the course of the last 2 months with 
this critique of the President's withdrawal plan. Some of it is 
legitimate, but some of it is really dangerous.
  So, in 2009, President Obama planned to send a whole bunch of 
additional troops into Afghanistan. It was Obama's surge--the idea that 
we would plus-up our troops there. We would partner with diplomats and 
aid administrators. It was a means to try to conquer and then hold 
territory in Afghanistan that had been taken by the Taliban.
  It was a really good plan. It had all kinds of counterinsurgency buzz 
words. The PowerPoint looked really sharp. And it was endorsed by a lot 
of smart

[[Page S6662]]

foreign policy thinkers. But then it was a total flop. It didn't work. 
I saw it in person.
  In 2011, I went out to a small town in western Afghanistan, where the 
surge was taking place, where a group of U.S. soldiers had taken back 
territory that had been previously controlled by the Taliban. We got a 
tour of this small town called Parmakan, and the elders in that town 
told us that the Taliban forced them to grow poppy. Poppy, then, was 
given or sold to the Taliban and used to fuel and fund the Taliban's 
insurgency against the United States.
  And now that the U.S. troops were there, poppy was still being grown 
in the fields. It was still being sold to the Taliban. The difference 
was that now the Taliban wasn't stealing it. The Taliban was paying a 
fairer price for the poppy, but we were still protecting the fields, a 
crop that was being sold to our enemy to finance the insurgency against 
us. It was a very clear, concrete example of how a plan that looked 
really good on paper wasn't playing out to our national security 
benefit in reality.
  Afghanistan wasn't a failure of execution. It was a failure of 
hubris. We came to believe that we could do something in Afghanistan 
that was, in reality, unachievable, though, on paper, achievable. This 
idea that we could build an American-style democracy and an American-
style military on the other side of the world amidst a culture we did 
not understand turned out to be an impossibility.
  But general after general, administration after administration, we 
refused to accept that reality. We believed that America could 
accomplish this feat, despite the fact that year after year, especially 
in the last decade, the Taliban got stronger and the amount of 
territory they conquered was bigger. The ability of the Afghan military 
and government to be able to deliver services and protect the people 
became less and less.
  One would think that the overnight collapse of the Afghan Government 
security forces on the 15th of August would have finally broken the 
back of this American ``execute better'' thinking, this belief that if 
we just fine-tune the plan once again, we will be able to do the 
impossible. But it is clear that, in fact, the opposite had happened; 
that since the fall of the Afghan Government and military, there has 
been new life infused into the architects and the cheerleaders of 
American military hubris's arguments.
  The scenes from the Kabul airport in the weeks following the Afghan 
Government's disintegration, they were devastating to watch. The 
stories of young girls and human rights activists desperately clamoring 
for a route out of the country, they were heartbreaking to hear. But 
the idea that the United States of America, a country located on the 
other side of the world from Kabul, could manage this unexpected 
collapse in a way that didn't produce panic and confusion or that we 
would be able to evacuate and find a home outside of the country for 
every Afghan who wanted to leave--it was, unfortunately, the same kind 
of magical thinking that got us into this mess in the first place and 
that kept us there for 10 years too long. It is just as illusory as the 
now-proven fantasy trumpeted by war hawks that America could build and 
train an Afghan Government and military into a new version of their 
American counterparts. And we risk falling into this trap again, 
believing that America can do things abroad that are beyond our reach.

  There are plenty of fights that are winnable. There is plenty of good 
that America can do. But there are limits, especially limits to our 
authority when we are leading with military intervention.
  There are no doubts there were mistakes made throughout the period of 
evacuation of U.S. forces and diplomats from Afghanistan. There is no 
way you run a mission that complicated without going back and finding 
things that you would have done differently.
  But in the end, we got 130,000 people out. That is the single biggest 
airlift of Americans and partners, certainly, in our lifetime and 
likely in the history of this country.
  It is hard to argue with those results in the end--130,000 Americans 
and Afghans taken out in a period of 2 weeks, when America controlled 
only the airport and no territory around it because of the 
disintegration of the Afghan military.
  But for many in Washington, many in the foreign policy consensus, 
many of the folks who want to stay in Afghanistan forever, they say 
130,000 wasn't good enough. But what is their specific complaint?
  Some of them say that the scenes at the airport of chaos was Joe 
Biden's fault. That is maybe the most nonsensical of the arguments 
because once the Afghan military and government fell apart overnight, 
there was nothing that a couple thousand American troops and diplomats 
were going to be able to do to prevent that chaos.
  You can argue that the United States should have seen that collapse 
coming, but the Afghan people didn't have access to our intelligence. 
The Afghan people didn't know that that was all going to fall apart 
overnight. And so, of course, when they heard that the United States 
was running flights out of Kabul, there was going to be a mad rush to 
the airport. It just doesn't make any sense to suggest that a couple 
thousand Americans inside Afghanistan were going to be able to prevent 
some very chaotic scenes on the ground.
  Other critics set a lower bar. They say that, well, the President 
couldn't have prevented the chaos, but he should have managed the 
evacuation better.
  Again, I will concede that there are things that could have been done 
better. But let's just talk about what the scene looked like on the 
ground. Let's talk about the reality.
  The reality is that the Taliban controlled the entire city outside of 
the airport. And when your enemy controls 99 percent of the country 
that you are trying to evacuate, unfortunately, many of the decisions 
about how the evacuation goes and how efficient or effective it is are 
outside of your control.
  The idea that in 2 weeks we were going to be able to manage a 
seamless evacuation of the country, when our enemy controlled 99 
percent of it, is ludicrous.
  Again, there is no doubt that things could have been done better. But 
in the end, we got 130,000 Americans out. We were very creative about 
the means and the methods by which we used to get our people home.
  Another criticism is that the President didn't get everybody out. 
Well, let's just remember what happened in the months leading up to the 
evacuation. Nineteen different times, the Biden administration told 
Americans who were there that things were going to get bad, and they 
should leave. Now, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do everything 
within our power to try to get those Americans out who didn't listen to 
those reminders. But it does mean that the President doesn't bear all 
of the blame for those who stayed after having reminded them over a 
dozen times that it was probably time to leave.
  It is a little difficult to hear this righteous indignation from 
Republicans about the President not getting more Afghans out when it is 
the Republican Party that is standing in the way of these refugees 
coming to the United States. Many of the same critics of the 
President's Afghanistan policy are the exact same Republicans who are 
right now saying that their State isn't going to take any Afghan 
refugees.
  You can't have it both ways. You can't criticize the President for 
not getting more of our partners out but then say that they shouldn't 
go any further than an airplane hangar in Doha, that your State isn't 
going to take any of these evacuees, any of these refugees.
  And, lastly, the most recent argument by this ``execute better'' 
crowd--the folks who think that, just like we could have succeeded in 
Afghanistan if we stayed another 10 years, we could have run a perfect 
and beautiful-looking evacuation in the midst of a country in chaos--is 
that America could have stayed indefinitely because the option somehow 
became much less costly and much less risky in 2021. These are the 
folks who say we should have kept a couple thousand troops there, and 
everything would have been fine.
  President Trump negotiated with the Taliban. The deal was that he 
would

[[Page S6663]]

draw down to 2,500 troops and then everybody else would leave in 2021. 
In exchange, the Taliban said: We won't attack U.S. forces, and we will 
not advance on provincial capitals.
  So when Joe Biden came to office, that was his reality. There were 
only a couple thousand troops left. The Taliban had gobbled up immense 
amounts of territory during the Trump administration, and they stood 
right outside of these capitals. Had Joe Biden chosen to walk away from 
that deal, hostilities would have begun between the United States and 
the Taliban. And I have listened to generals tell us for the last 10 
years that there is no way that the United States could protect its own 
forces and stand up an effective Afghan military operation with less 
than 8,500. All of a sudden--all of a sudden--2,500 was enough, when 
for years the military was telling us, if you get down below 10,000, 
you are in big trouble.
  But that doesn't even speak to the new reality that greeted us in 
2021. That was the Taliban now not just out in the hinterlands, not 
just fighting for control of rural Afghanistan but on the precipice of 
these cities, ready to get involved in complicated, deadly, urban 
warfare. That argues for the number not being 8,500 but being twice 
that or three times that likely would have been necessary in order to 
buttress and stand up and support the Afghan military when street 
fighting happened inside these provincial capitals. Twenty-five hundred 
wasn't going to be enough.
  Of course, the real desire for most of these ``execute better'' 
thinkers was for America to just stay. Now, I know folks bristle at 
this phrase ``forever war.'' A lot of folks say that we should have 
kept 2,500, 5,000 there. They say that we weren't going to stay 
forever. They just say we should stay until we finish the job, which is 
defined as establishing an American-style representative government and 
an American-style unified military command. But if we couldn't 
accomplish that in 20 years--the longest U.S. war in history--why on 
Earth do we think that things would have changed after another 5 or 
another 10? My belief is that the goal that we set out was, 
unfortunately, impossible, which is why that PowerPoint slide reads, we 
stay in Afghanistan until it is stable; while reality reads, stay 
forever.

  It is worth reminding that Americans overwhelmingly supported this 
plan to withdraw because they had seen how the plans never matched up 
with reality on the ground, and it was ultimately their sons' and 
daughters' blood that was going to be spilled. It was their money that 
was going to be spent.
  The real danger is casually coming to this collective American 
conclusion that, just like our occupation was possible but executed 
poorly, that the withdrawal was simply a failure of planning, rather 
than an inevitability, given the circumstances handed to President 
Biden and his team.
  There are some military missions that cannot be completed, no matter 
how smart the planners are. This lesson has got to be learned or we are 
destined to suffer more Iraqs and more Afghanistans.
  Finally, I will end with this: It is worth noting--and I said this 
earlier--that just because the mission we set out to achieve in 
Afghanistan was not possible, that that doesn't mean that everything 
else is impossible. That doesn't mean that America can't be a force for 
good in the world.
  Our experience in Afghanistan is not a reason to disappear from 
global engagement. Just because this big thing wasn't possible doesn't 
mean that every big thing is impossible.
  And so my hope is that by withdrawing from Afghanistan, we allow for 
the Biden administration and administrations to follow to be able to 
pivot to contests and fights that we can win, to put more effort into 
contesting Chinese expansionism, or to put more effort into providing 
nonmilitary aid to organic local democracy movements, or being more of 
a force for economic empowerment in the developing world. These are 
goals that are difficult, but they are achievable.
  So there are plenty of negative consequences to our withdrawal from 
Afghanistan, but there are also beneficial consequences as well.
  The greatest benefit is that we now have this energy and money and 
manpower that has been devoted to this failing mission for 20 years 
that can now be directed to these more achievable and more worthwhile 
goals, but only if we cure ourselves of this ``execute better'' 
mentality that is often connected to our military intervention. I think 
that is necessary so that America never again gets distracted from 
achievable goals by another impossible Afghanistan-like mission.
  Thank you.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey.