Austin, Blinken to testify on Afghanistan pullout as al-Qaeda expands footing in Kabul

Biden administration’s top officials Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin will testify in private before Senate’s Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees next week over troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. The hearing is scheduled for 10 am on January 11, according to an update on the Committee on Foreign Relations and Committee on Armed Services website on Jan. 6, Wednesday.

No further details were released as of yesterday. Both Blinken and Austin have at least once testified before the Senate panel along with other members of the administration and Pentagon about Biden administration’s foreign policy in Afghanistan that resulted in a hasty and chaotic drawdown and political control of Kabul by the Taliban. 

On September 14, last year, Defence Secretary Austin was excoriated for a no-show and Biden’s Secretary of State Blinken appeared at the hearing two weeks later. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), at the time, asserted that Austin must be compelled to testify for “fatally flawed” withdrawal. He stressed that a “full accounting of the US response to this crisis is not complete without the Pentagon - especially when it comes to understanding the complete collapse of the US trained and funded Afghan military.”

In his earlier testimony, the American Defense Secretary told the Senate committee, “The fact that the Afghan army we and our partners trained simply melted away, in many cases without firing a shot, took us all by surprise.” "It would be dishonest to claim otherwise," he acknowledged. 

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had made an unannounced visit to Afghanistan to sell Afghan leaders and a wary public on President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw all American troops from the country and end America’s longest war. [Credit: AP]

“We need to consider some uncomfortable truths: that we did not fully comprehend the depth of corruption and poor leadership in their senior ranks, we didn’t grasp the damaging effect of frequent and unexplained rotations by [Afghan] President Ghani of his commanders, we did not anticipate the snowball effect caused by the deals that the Taliban* commanders struck with local leaders,” Austin said during the hearing, according to the broadcast and transcripts of the testimony released by Senate’s Foreign Relations and Armed Services committee at the time. 

Al-Qaeda expanding presence in Kabul 

The recent hearing is scheduled as Austin had earlier claimed that the United States military was able to contain terrorism threats emanating from Afghanistan, but just recently it was reported that al-Qaeda, the terrorist organisation, has grown slightly inside Afghanistan since US forces exited the territory in late August. Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of US Central Command, said in an interview with The Associated Press that the hasty withdrawal and removal of US military and intelligence assets from Afghanistan has made it even more difficult for Washington to track down the terrorists that carried out 9/11 on US twin towers. 

“We're probably at about 1 or 2% of the capabilities we once had to look into Afghanistan,” Gen. McKenzie said, adding that this makes it “very hard, not impossible to ensure that neither al-Qaeda nor the Islamic State group's Afghanistan affiliate can pose a threat to the United States.”

[Credit: AP]

McKenzie said it's clear that al-Qaeda is attempting to rebuild in Afghanistan and Taliban leaders are divided over whether to fulfill their 2020 pledge to break ties with the organization. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, though, in his earlier testimony defended the Biden administration's withdrawal from Afghanistan and the chaotic evacuation. "We made the right decision," he said, "not sending another generation of Americans to fight and die in Afghanistan. We did the right thing by our citizens, working feverishly to get every one of them out. We did the right thing by 5,000 Afghans to bring them to safety, and now we're working to do the right thing to hold the Taliban to the expectations of the international community.”

When Democrats enquired why the troops abandoned key Bagram Air Base, from where evacuation may have been more effectively done, Blinken blamed the former Trump administration, who he said, left the incoming government little to work with apart from a deadline to withdraw by May. "We inherited a deadline," Blinken said. "We did not inherit a plan."