Secretary Antony J. Blinken Before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Meeks, distinguished colleagues on this committee, first of all let me just say I have very much appreciated working with you these past four years, working with the ranking member. I think we've done good and important things together.

(Interruption.)

CHAIRMAN MCCAUL: Remind the audience members disruption of committee proceedings is against the law. Holding up signs or making verbal outbursts during the proceedings is disruptive and will not be tolerated. Any disruption will result in a suspension of the proceedings until the Capitol Police can restore order. This includes the raisings of hands and other forms of disruption.

With that, I now recognize the Secretary.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and just to say how much I have valued and appreciated working with you these past four years, the dialogue that we've had, including with this committee, where we've agreed, where we've disagreed, including on Afghanistan.

I want to recognize everyone who served in Afghanistan, including on this committee. Our thoughts are with the Gold Star families of the 2,461 American servicemembers, as well as State Department and USAID employees -

(Interruption.)

CHAIRMAN MCCAUL: The committee will suspend while the Capitol Police restore order to this committee.

The gentleman will continue.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: As I said, our thoughts are with all of the Gold Star families. They're with the State Department and USAID employees who lost their lives over the course of 20 years of our military involvement in Afghanistan. And I think today especially of the 13 heroes that we lost at Abbey Gate, and I deeply regret that we did not do more and could not do more to protect them. And to those families who are here with us today, you're in my thoughts, in my prayers. I wish that Nicole was here with us today. I'm deeply sorry that she's not.

I'm also deeply grateful to the dedicated professionals from the State Department, from the Defense Department, from across the government, from civil society, other partners who did so much to support the people of Afghanistan over those two decades.

(Interruption.)

CHAIRMAN MCCAUL: Committee will come to order. Committee will suspend while the Capitol Police restore order. Committee will come to order.

The gentleman will continue.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: I'm here today to continue the department's extensive cooperation with this committee.

As you know, Mr. Chairman, the department has provided over 20,000 pages of documents to you. We've conducted nine high-level briefings for members; we've facilitated transcribed interviews for more than 15 people.

I personally testified before the House and Senate committees 14 times with questions on Afghanistan, including four times before this committee.

Now, I believe that any attempt to understand and learn from the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has to be put in the proper context of what preceded it, both in terms of the two decades following 9/11 and the decisions and events of 2020 to 2021 that culminated in the removal of our personnel.

When President Biden took office, he inherited an agreement the previous administration had reached with the Taliban to remove all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by May 1st of 2021.

At U.S. insistence, the Afghan Government had released 5,000 Taliban prisoners, including top war commanders. The United States reduced on our own troop levels from 14,000 to 2,500 in December of 2020.

In return, the Taliban agreed to stop attacking U.S. and partner forces, to refrain from threatening Afghanistan's major cities, and to pursue intra-Afghan negotiations toward a ceasefire and a political settlement.

But it continued a relentless march in the countryside so that it controlled or actively contested territory containing three-quarters of Afghanistan's population by December 2020.

In January 2021, the Taliban was in the strongest military position it had been in since 9/11, and we had the smallest number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan since 2001.

Despite the profound effects of the Doha agreement, President Biden ultimately opted to implement the previous administration's decision to withdraw American troops and honor his pledge to end our nation's longest war.

To the extent President Biden faced a choice, it was between ending the war or escalating it.

Had he not followed through on his predecessor's commitment, attacks on our forces and allies would have resumed, and the Taliban's assault on the country's major cities would have commenced.

That would have required sending tens of thousands more U.S. forces back into Afghanistan to defend ourselves and prevent a Taliban takeover, with at best the prospect of restoring a stalemate and remaining stuck in Afghanistan, under fire, indefinitely.

President Biden inherited a deadline but no plan to meet it.

At his direction, beginning in the spring of 2021, the administration and the State Department in particular engaged in extensive planning for a whole range of outcomes.

We pursued a sustained campaign to urge any Americans in Afghanistan to leave.

We restarted and dramatically increased resources to what had been a moribund Special Immigrant Visa program to bring Afghans who had worked by our side over 20 years to the United States.

Even the U.S. Government's most pessimistic assessments did not anticipate that the Afghan Government and security forces would collapse so rapidly in the face of Taliban advances.

Nevertheless, because of the administration's extensive interagency planning and coordination, when Kabul fell on August 15th, the United States was able to evacuate our embassy and relocate our diplomats to the airport within 48 hours, and then conduct the largest airlift in U.S. history, helping approximately 120,000 Americans, Afghans, and citizens of allied nations depart Afghanistan in just two weeks.

In the three years since the end of our country's longest war, all of us, including myself, have wrestled with what we could have done differently during that period and over the preceding two decades.

I asked retired Ambassador Dan Smith, one of our most senior diplomats, to lead an after-action review of the State Department's actions between January 2020 and August 2021.

In response to Ambassador Smith's report, the department has taken more than 40 concrete initiatives and identified steps to guide our response to future crises. The actions we've taken have already made a difference in subsequent emergencies, including in Sudan, in Israel, in Lebanon.

Even as we work to address the places where we fell short, I firmly believe the President's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan was the right one. American troops are no longer fighting and dying in Afghanistan. The American people are safer and more secure.

In fact, many of the most pessimistic predictions have been thoroughly disproven.

We were told Afghanistan would once again become a haven for terrorists and that, as the majority report contends, "we would be all but blind to the situation on the ground."

In fact, al-Qaida, the group that attacked us on 9/11, has not regrouped in Afghanistan, and in August 2022 we launched a precision strike in downtown Kabul that took out its leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, with no American boots on the ground.

We were told that our allies would no longer trust us. Well, having just returned from more NATO meetings in Brussels and my 20th trip to the Indo-Pacific as Secretary of State, it's clear that our alliances, our partnerships are stronger today than they've been in a generation.

You can see that in the more than 50 countries that we brought together to defend Ukraine against Russia's ongoing aggression and in the unity of purpose and action that we've built for contending with the challenges posed by China.

We were told hundreds of Americans and Afghan partners would be left behind, yet today, every U.S. citizen who told us that they wanted to leave during the evacuation has now had the opportunity to do so.

And to those Americans who entered the country since August 2021 and have been detained by the Taliban, we will not rest until we bring you home.

Since September 2021, the administration has resettled more than 185,000 Afghans. We've approved or welcomed to the United States more than 68,000 Afghans under the Special Immigrant Visa program. That is nearly half of all of the SIVs issued since the program's inception in 2009.

This is a profoundly difficult period for the Afghan people, especially Afghanistan's women and girls. But I believe the final chapter has not been written on Afghanistan.

Just last week I had the chance to be with many partners who supported the evacuation effort, including members of Congress.

We were joined by a resilient and resourceful young woman who left Afghanistan in August 2021 and is now an aerospace engineering student at MIT. She aspires to be the first Afghan woman astronaut.

In part because of our two-decade commitment to Afghanistan, there are many more women who had the opportunity to go to school, to connect with the wider world, to imagine a different life for themselves. And these women - their experiences, their hopes - will I know one day help pave a path to an Afghanistan where all people can actually choose their own futures.

Thank you.

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