Democrats: “Trump did it.”
The United States House of Representatives committee on Oversight and Accountability held a full committee hearing today on the “The Biden Administration’s Disastrous Withdrawal from Afghanistan, Part I: Review by the Inspectors General.” The hearing revealed that the Biden administration has been stonewalling the Inspector Generals (IG), effectively preventing them from doing their jobs. In addition, the IGs testified to the enormous amount of waste and fraud that has occurred under the Biden regime. One IG testified that out of 300,000 Afghan soldiers that the United States taxpayer was paying for, roughly 150,000 of them were ghosts, they did not exist.
The witnesses that appeared before the committee were: Robert Storch (Statement)-Inspector General for the Department of Defense (DoD), Diana Shaw (Statement)–Acting Inspector General, performing the duties of the Inspector General Department of State, Nicole L. Angarella (Statement)-Acting Deputy Inspector General, performing the duties of the Inspector General for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and John Sopko Inspector (Statement)-General Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).
The hearing was chaired by James Comer (R-KY) and the ranking member was Jaime Raskin (D-MD). Raskin, in his opening statement, naturally tried to deflect the blame to President Trump, an old play from an old playbook. Raskin completely ignores the multiple Biden regime officials that have claimed everything was fine, a fact illustrated by a video played during Comer’s opening statement.
Storch, in his opening statement, informed the committee that the United States had poured over $2 Trillion into Afghanistan at the cost of 2,400 Americans who gave their lives. Storch also testified to the waste, fraud, and corruption in Afghanistan. For instance, Storch found that between 2006 and 2015 over $800 million in equipment and monies were “unaccounted for”. Towards the end of his opening statement, Storch testified that the “…DoD OIG found that Afghan evacuees were not vetted by the National Counter‑Terrorism Center using all DoD data prior to arriving in the United States.” Scary.
Diana Shaw’s opening statement spoke to, among other issues, some of the causes of the chaotic evacuation of the U.S. Embassy:
“We found that while Embassy Kabul complied with applicable emergency planning guidance and took some preparatory actions, it was not fully prepared for the challenges it encountered. Among other things, we found that embassy leadership’s concerns that overt evacuation planning would cause panic and undermine support for the Afghan government resulted in unclear communication with embassy personnel about the timing and scope of a potential evacuation. This lack of communication caused confusion among staff and reduced the preparedness of some personnel for an evacuation. We also found that the embassy did not have clearly defined eligibility criteria for the evacuation and used unreliable data regarding the potential number of evacuees. This resulted in a far greater number of people being evacuated than had been anticipated. We further found that, as the evacuation was unfolding, unclear leadership, logistical changes, and communication issues contributed to the chaos around the evacuation at the international airport in Kabul.”
Shaw also spoke to the fraud allowed by the embassy, testifying that an audit found: “…embassy’s Public Affairs Section’s… failed to verify whether grant recipients had ties to corruption, human rights violations, or illicit narcotics production; did not sufficiently document annual reviews of awards or the mitigation of identified risks; and failed to obtain the required performance and financial reports for awards.”
John F. Sopko, the Special Inspector General Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, testified that the U.S. taxpayer is still paying for Afghanistan. Surprise! Sopko stated:
It may come as a surprise to many of your constituents of the amount of assistance the U.S. government is now providing in Afghanistan and that this assistance is little changed from before the withdrawal. In the health sector alone, the United States continues to support hospitals and clinics and provide training and salaries for health care professionals.”
Sopko continued:
“…while aid continues, unfortunately so do many of the problems that SIGAR has identified over the past decade, including problems that led to the collapse of the Afghan government and security forces. These problems are compounded by the persistent refusal of the Department of State and, to a lesser extent, USAID to fully comply with their legal obligation to provide requested information to SIGAR.”
During the question and answer period of the hearing, this is how Sopoko answered about who was advising that the Afghan government would succeed and the Afghan ghost army that U.S. citizens are paying.
So far $8 billion in U.S. aid has continued to go to Afghanistan since the disastrous Biden withdrawal. The programs, Sopko stated, are “not being operated on the ground by U.S. government employees but rather, implemented through various NGOs and international organizations such as the World Food Programme and UNICEF.”
Those are the highlights, but there is so much more in the testimonies and the questions and answers during the hearing. Before you go, you must watch Rep Higgins explaining how a sniper had the terrorist that killed our 13 brave servicemen and women in sight, but was ordered to stand down and not engage. Higgins wants to know who gave that order.
View the full hearing here.