Jamie Raskin Exposes The Bias Behind The GOP's Afghanistan Hearing
House Oversight Committee ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) called out the bias in the way that Republicans constructed the Afghanistan withdrawal hearing.
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Jamie Raskin Spots The Republican Bias
Rep. Jamie Raskin spotted something wrong with the premise behind the House Oversight Committee’s hearing on the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The hearing was constructed to blame President Biden for the terrorist attack at the Kabul Airport while leaving out very important facts.
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After pointing out that Biden was president for three percent of the war in Afghanistan, Raskin said:
Even when we zero in on the final months of the war, my Republican colleagues refuse to examine President Trump’s disastrous decision to cut out the Afghan government and negotiate directly with the Taliban and then to enter into a dangerously lopsided agreement with these authoritarian religious fanatics.
In the Trump-Taliban agreement, or Doha Agreement, Trump struck numerous bad deals and fateful bargains with the Taliban that would come back to haunt us, including the release of 5,000 Taliban fighters from prison, many of whom promptly rejoined the insurgents in their battle to recapture Kabul.
Our colleagues have also conveniently ignored President Trump’s decision—just four days after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the November 2020 presidential election—to secretly order the withdrawal of all troops by January 15, 2021, a move that stunned his own military generals, and which Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley called, “odd, not standard and potentially dangerous.” After significant pushback, President Trump rescinded his secret order and replaced it with a directive to draw down to 2,500 troops.
Months later, when President Trump begrudgingly left Washington under a cloud of bear mace and tear gas, he did so without providing the Biden-Harris Administration any plans at all on how to safely withdraw the remaining U.S. troops or how to safely evacuate Americans and our Afghan allies within the strict timeline prescribed by the Trump-Taliban Agreement.
This failure was not an accident but was calculated to force President Biden’s hand. President Trump later bragged about this maneuver at a rally with his supporters stating, “I started the process. All the troops are coming back home. They couldn’t stop the process. They wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process...”
Trump moved forward with the withdrawal of U.S. troops even as the Taliban increased violent attacks against the Afghan government and refused to sever ties with terrorist groups, including the Haqqani network and al-Qaida.
House Republicans decided to ignore the fact that Trump intentionally left Biden an impossible position on Afghanistan and instead decided to try to reshape the story of the war as a partisan attack disguised as congressional oversight.
We will discuss the consequences of the kind of misuse of oversight power below.
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