[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 31 (Wednesday, February 16, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Page S726]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                              Afghanistan

  Mr. President, now on a different matter, while the world's eyes are 
fixed on the present foreign policy crisis, troubling facts are 
continuing to surface surrounding the administration's previous self-
inflicted crisis--the botched retreat from Afghanistan.
  Last week, journalists published the findings of a 2,000-page autopsy 
that Army officials compiled following the chaotic withdrawal from 
Kabul. The report hammers home a damning fact we have actually already 
known for months: The Biden administration received clear advance 
warnings from commanders on the ground that should have been heeded but 
went ignored. As I warned at the time, we have confirmation this 
disaster was foreseeable--foreseen, actually--and avoidable.
  The Army's conclusions build upon the report from the Special 
Inspector General which was declassified last month.
  While President Biden and his political advisers still cling to the 
notion that they got mistaken advice and were caught off-guard, both 
these reports suggest that nonpartisan experts knew and predicted the 
Afghan military would likely collapse and spent months trying in vain 
to get the administration to pay attention.
  Top commanders reported that trying to get State Department officials 
to engage in advance evacuation plans was like ``pulling teeth''; that 
the National Security Council was ``not seriously planning for an 
evacuation''; that among peers in uniform, ``everyone clearly saw some 
of the advantage of holding Bagram.''
  As the top U.S. commander on the ground during the evacuation put it, 
policymakers had not ``paid attention to the indicators of what was 
happening on the ground.''
  This staggering report from our own U.S. Army should have chastened 
the Biden administration. It should be an occasion for apology, 
reflection, and accountability. But last week, President Biden instead 
tried to simply wave away our own Army's conclusions without evidence.
  He was asked, ``Are you rejecting the conclusions or the accounts in 
this [Army] report?''
  The President replied, ``Yes, I am.''
  ``So, they're not true?''
  ``I'm rejecting them,'' the President said.
  No evidence; just hand-waving denial. Frankly, it was a bizarre 
performance.
  Our retreat from Afghanistan seriously damaged America's credibility. 
It made confronting terrorist threats that much harder from over the 
horizon, and it invited more testing like what we are now enduring in 
Eastern Europe.
  President Biden and his team were warned of all these dangers well in 
advance by our own military, but our Commander in Chief seems to have 
flat-out ignored our commanders. This has been an unbelievably costly 
lesson that the Biden administration should never have had to learn 
even once. Let us all hope they don't need to learn it twice.