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(NewsNation) — During a hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Antony Blinken pushed back criticism about 2021. withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.
The committee says the hearing is the culmination of three years of investigations.
Lawmakers have demanded answers about the chaotic evacuation, including when thirteen American service members and 170 Afghans died in a suicide bombing at Abbey Gate entrance of Hamid Karzai International Airport.
Asked by House Foreign Affairs Chair Michael McCaul, R-Texas, who was responsible for the evacuation, Blinken said he was responsible for the State Department.
“The government, the (Biden) administration, was responsible for the evacuation,” Blinken responded. “Specifically, the State Department and the Department of Defense … on any (non-combatant evacuation operation) worked closely together, with clearly assigned responsibilities.”
Blinken was asked to testify before the committee several times before he did so Wednesday. Republican representatives tried earlier this year to hold him in contempt of Congress for failure to comply with a subpoena to appear.
“I have been disappointed that you have ignored my requests for my testimony, forcing me to subpoena you not once, but twice,” McCaul said at the hearing Wednesday.
The State Department, meanwhile, has said it has provided the Foreign Affairs Committee members with large amounts of information and that Blinken has testified before Congress on Afghanistan more than 14 times.
A report by GOP representatives on the Foreign Affairs Committee was released in September, accusing the Biden administration of failing to see warning signs about how quickly Kabul would fall to the Taliban, as well as delaying an evacuation, NewsNation’s partner The Hill reported.
In response, White House officials said the report cherry-picked details and did not place enough blame on President-elect Donald Trump, who started the withdrawal process by signing a deal with Afghanistan’s militant Islamist Taliban in 2020. Similarly, some Democratic lawmakers, as well as Blinken , on Wednesday defended the Biden administration’s response by blaming Trump.
The reason the withdrawal happened when it did, Democrats said, was because the Trump administration was negotiating a specific date for when troops would leave Afghanistan with the Taliban, leaving Biden with little wiggle room.
“President (Joe) Biden faced a choice, it was between ending the war or escalating it,” Blinken said. “Had he not followed through on his predecessor’s commitment, attacks on our forces and allies would have resumed and Taliban attacks on the country’s major cities would have begun.”
Republicans, on the other hand, argued that the Taliban didn’t even abide by that agreement, so Biden didn’t have to abide by it either.
The Taliban overtook Kabul just days after the evacuation from Afghanistan, leaving an estimated 100,000 partners in the U.S. government effort behind, The Hill reported.
“Even with the warning bells sounding loud and ringing loudly, you denied the imminent and dangerous threats to American interests, American citizens and our decade-long Afghan partners,” McCaul told Blinken on Wednesday. “All the while, the Taliban captured province after province on their march to Kabul.”
Blinken maintained that “nobody expected” Afghanistan’s armed forces “to collapse as quickly as they did.”
Today, any U.S. citizen who told the State Department they wanted to leave during the evacuation “has now had the opportunity to do so,” Blinken told lawmakers.
“To the Americans who have entered the country since August 2021: We will not rest until we bring you home,” Blinken said.
Democratic Representative Gregory Meeks, the committee’s ranking member, praised Blinken for being the first official to testify before the House immediately after the events of the recall.
Meeks called the Republican members’ report “biased and misleading.”
It “distorts the facts received in their own investigation from 16 State Department witnesses and thousands of pages of documents,” Meek said.
McCaul asked Blinken if Russia’s invasion of Ukraine happened in part because of the Afghan withdrawal, as the former country sensed weakness.
To which Blinken said, “Absolutely not.”
“Russia would have been happy for us to have remained stuck in Afghanistan for another 20 years,” Blinken said.
Reuters contributed to this report.