Congressmen tell Secretary of State to resign over botch Afghan exit

 Washington Examiner:

A hearing billed as the first part of a major evaluation of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan featured criticism of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and calls for his resignation.

“Your bizarre abandoning of Bagram Airfield led directly to 13 Marines murdered in Kabul,” Rep. Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican, told Blinken after endorsing a newspaper editorial that accused President Joe Biden of telling “six lies” about Afghanistan. “You should resign. I yield back.”

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That exchange reflected the pattern of the hearing: Most Republicans attacked Blinken, while most Democrats defended him. Blinken, for his part, sought to pin the blame for the troubled withdrawal — which a prominent German politician called "the greatest debacle that NATO has seen since its foundation" — on former President Donald Trump’s approach to negotiating the U.S.-Taliban peace deal that set the stage for the U.S. withdrawal.

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Blinken faced numerous rebukes for the loss of U.S. military equipment, which he countered by observing the Taliban don’t have the skills to use that technology.

“Much of it, based on what I understand from my colleagues at [the Defense Department], is inoperable or soon will become inoperable because it has to be maintained,” he said.

That statement dovetails with a related criticism that Biden crippled the Afghan military by withdrawing the U.S. mechanics who maintain their warplanes, even as he argued the U.S. could withdraw without fearing a Taliban takeover because of the central government’s advantage in air power.

“We had built [the Afghan] military in our own image, that relied on airpower, that relied on logistics, and then we pulled our logistics and airpower support from the Afghan military,” Kinzinger said.

While Blinken said the rapidity of the Taliban takeover caught the Biden team by surprise, one of his allies implied U.S. officials foresaw the possibility.

“I sat in many hearings, sat in many classified and open briefings, as we were looking at various scenarios of what that withdrawal looks like, what the capabilities of the Afghan government were,” said Rep. Ami Bera, a California Democrat. "And unfortunately, the worst-case scenario played out, and the images that we saw coming out of Afghanistan were painful, frankly, in the last few weeks of August.”

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Rep. Lee Zeldin, a New York Republican, echoed Wilson’s denunciation of Blinken.

“This was fatally flawed, poorly executed — we had the loss of U.S. service members as a result,” Zeldin told Blinken. “What we should have done was tell the Taliban that we’re going to leave Afghanistan when we’re done bringing every last American home ... And I believe that you, sir, should resign. That would be leadership.”

 Blinken claimed he did not inherit a plan for leaving Afghanistan while ignoring the fact that the Trump deal was conditional and that the Taliban had not met those conditions.  It is also absurd to go forward without a plan as the Biden administration did.  They should have stayed and beefed up US forces while they organized a proper withdrawal which included getting all the American s and their allies out of the country first.  They should have worked with our NATO allies on a withdrawal instead of not even telling them about the disorganized retreat Biden had in mind.

See, also:

Blinken Tells Irate Congress the US Was Ready on Afghanistan

This is not a credible statement.