The task is daunting: the 16-person bipartisan commission was mandated by Congress to determine what went wrong and how America’s leaders should respond the next time the United States goes to war. The commission’s work spans policies and actions taken by four presidential administrations, the U.S. military, the State Department, U.S. allies, and many other agencies, organizations, and people.
The Commission will conduct an investigation within 18 months. A final public report will be submitted in August 2026.
US withdrawal from Afghanistan completed in August 2021 war, But the withdrawal put the United States back into the hands of the Taliban, the enemy the United States has spent trillions of dollars trying to defeat since the aftermath of 9/11. The bloody and chaotic withdrawal left 13 U.S. soldiers and scores of Afghans dead, left thousands of U.S. allies in an uncertain fate, sparked widespread bipartisan outrage and triggered highly politicized congressional investigations and hearings.
The Republican-led House Foreign Affairs Committee is due to deliver its final report next month detailing its findings on the withdrawal, which has featured hours of heated and sometimes emotional testimony from Biden administration officials, military commanders, veterans and their families. The committee is also due to interview Jen Psaki, Biden’s foreign affairs adviser, next week. White House Press Secretary at the time of the withdrawal.
Former ambassadors, military officers and CIA officers appeared as witnesses during the 4 1/2-hour debate by the committee on the war at VA headquarters in Washington on Friday, attended by a small audience of observers, many of whom were involved in the war.
Mr. Chaudhary and his co-chair, Collin F. Jackson, a former Defense Department official, acknowledge the tense atmosphere surrounding their effort, which itself was born out of the collective anger after the withdrawal three years ago.
But they stressed that they are calling for thoughtful, non-political dialogue, even if the committee members are selected by Republican and Democratic lawmakers in the midst of national distress. “We are bipartisan in composition, but we are bipartisan in our work,” Chaudhary said.
The issue of blame is hard to ignore, they acknowledge. “It comes up again and again in our conversations,” Chaudhary told the panelists. People want to know whether the commission will issue names and accusations, whether indicting leaders who made some of the war’s worst decisions will bring some measure of justice.
The Committee will endeavour to prevent this from happening, while at the same time: “We will provide full, objective, rigorous, unadorned and unflinching reporting on our performance as a government and a military,” Jackson said. “We have a responsibility to the generation that served in Afghanistan and to the generations that will serve elsewhere.”
It’s not just about assessing the war. Failure. The committee members They said the report will contain guidance – practical advice that can be applied to other wars the U.S. is involved in, such as the ongoing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, as well as wars that have not yet happened but may one day come.
If the first hearing is any guide to the commissioners’ conclusions, it’s that a whole lot of different things got wrong.
Successive administrations have failed to address the significant role that Pakistan, a nominal U.S. ally, has played in sustaining and protecting the Taliban, said Nader Naderi, a former senior Afghan government official and witness, who also served as a senior official in the country. U.S. leaders have often prioritized short-term military objectives over long-term values, at times making statements that undermined the Afghan government’s credibility, he said.
During the war, the chain of command was complex, there were intense personality clashes among American decision-makers and agencies, and commanders’ tenure was so short that it was “the institutional equivalent of a lobotomy,” said another witness, Ronald Newman, a former ambassador to Afghanistan and author of Another War: Winning and Losing in Afghanistan (published in 1960). Years before the American withdrawal.
Political anthropologist Noah Coburn, who testified Friday, said the system for parliamentary elections was badly rigged and led to fraud. U.S. leaders interfered too much publicly in Afghan politics while Afghans were asked too little for policy input. U.S. misjudgments about security partners, development and investments fostered corruption, spreading distrust in the government and support for the Taliban insurgents, Coburn said. Civilian casualties, violent warlords and inadequate security also fostered corruption.
That’s not to say that nobody said that during the war. Much had been written. There was a wealth of experts and records about what was happening on the ground, commissioners and panelists acknowledged. But U.S. officials often failed to absorb the information, and successive administrations failed to use that knowledge to make policy changes.
“The obvious question is, what kind of decisions are you considering?” co-chair Jackson said.
“The short answer is it would be a very difficult selection process because it would involve a lot more decisions than we can detail,” he said.
Jackson said the decision to invade Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks will obviously be one of the topics of interest. The committee will look at the decision to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan in 2009. They will look at the decision that led to negotiations with the Taliban. And, of course, they will look at the decision to withdraw.
The commissioners acknowledged that their task was wide-ranging. — To a cynic, that’s probably almost impossibly ambitious. What began as a mission to understand and educate is partly an exercise in mass therapy, and has been embraced not just by governments, but by Not just for officials, but for the general public, especially veterans. Accept what has happened.
“For many of us, the war is still fresh in our minds. We carry the mental, physical and emotional scars with us every day,” Chaudhary said. “Resolution may not be possible for everyone,” but there needs to be space for “civil dialogue,” she added.
