How GOP Plans to Keep Afghanistan Withdrawal Front and Center for Election

When the Republican leadership of the House Foreign Affairs Committee released a lengthy report on Monday blasting the Biden administration’s handling of the U.S. exit from Afghanistan in 2021, they signaled a strategy that the GOP plans to keep the debate over how America ended its longest war at the top of voters’ minds this fall.

The partisan review outlines the final months of military and civilian failures, following Trump’s February 2020 withdrawal deal with the Taliban that set the exit in motion. Some eighteen months later, the Taliban was able to sweep through and conquer Kabul even before the last U.S. officials flew out, shocking even U.S. intelligence agencies in the speed of the Afghan government’s collapse.

The exit resulted in scenes of chaos broadcast around the world, as well as the loss of 13 U.S. service members who died in a suicide bombing outside the main airport. That event marked the beginning of President Joe Biden’s steady decline in the polls—a long and slow slide that eventually forced him to end his reelection campaign at the behest of his party’s other leaders.

While the House report, led by Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, divulges little new information, it wraps up a three-year investigation involving heated public hearings and clashes with senior Biden officials over document access.

The report’s release comes a day before the first presidential debate between Harris and Trump, which also happens to be when House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will preside over the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony that will honor the 13 fallen service members and their families.

Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the two highest-ranking Democrats in Congress, are expected to attend the event, just hours before attention shifts to the debate stage in Philadelphia.

Previously focused on Biden and his top officials, the House GOP is now trying to highlight Kamala Harris‘ role in the withdrawal, framing her as a key player in its botched execution. In the McCaul report, Harris’ name is mentioned 28 times in the executive summary alone, while Trump’s name is cited twice. The report repeatedly refers to the “Biden-Harris administration.”

Almost immediately after Harris became the Democratic nominee, Trump and his GOP allies have tried to make the chaotic events of August 2021 stick to her. The Trump campaign has repeatedly pointing out that the vice president said she was the “last person in the room” when Biden decided to pull out the troops.

“She had the final vote,” Trump said at a rally in North Carolina in August. “She had the final say, and she was all for it.”

House Democrats, in a statement, said the report by their Republican colleagues ignored facts about Trump’s role and accused Republicans of using the investigation as a political weapon against the Harris-Walz ticket.

McCaul’s team denies those charges.

The White House also slammed the report, saying it was full of “cherry-picked facts” and laying the blame back on Trump: “Because of the bad deal former President Trump cut with the Taliban to get out of Afghanistan by May of 2021, President Biden inherited an untenable position.”

Various other investigations into the withdrawal found enough blame to go around across four presidential administrations dating back to the Bush White House, which began the war after 9/11.

“She owns every failure of the Biden-Harris administration,” Jason Miller, Trump campaign advisor, said on a press call Monday. “Biden is not in charge of anything. I don’t think he’s even in charge of tying his own shoes.”

Harris’s campaign responded sharply. Morgan Finkelstein, the Harris-Walz national security spokesperson, said: “Trump shamelessly attacks the Vice President because he hopes he can trick the country into forgetting that his own actions undermined U.S. strategy and put our troops and allies in harm’s way.”

For his part, Donald Trump has criticized the Afghan withdrawal long before Harris became the nominee, seeing its salience as a political millstone he could tie around Biden. In a recent speech to National Guard members in Detroit, the former said said that the exit “set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world.”

Trump has also accused both Biden and Harris of bearing personal responsibility for the suicide bomb attack that killed the 13 U.S. service members at the Kabul airport, “just like they pulled the trigger.”

Last month, Trump underscored this point during a campaign stop, where he visited the grave of a Marine killed in the attack at Arlington National Cemetery. The move drew sharp criticism from both the Harris campaign and some veterans, as cemetery officials noted that Trump violated rules against election-related activities at the site. A skirmish between a member of the Trump camp and a cemetery official over filming access escalated the controversy.

Harris first accused Trump of staging a “political stunt,” an accusation that eventually backfired after the Trump campaign said the former president was invited by families of the fallen soldiers to attend the event.

“President Trump was invited by us, the Gold Star families, to attend the solemn ceremonies commemorating the three-year anniversary of our children’s deaths,” said the families in a joint statement and accompanying videos that the Trump camp blasted out across social media. “He was there to honor their sacrifice, yet Vice President Harris has disgracefully twisted this sacred moment into a political ploy.”

Analysts who spoke to Newsweek said the Afghanistan withdrawal was clearly a low point of the Biden administration.

“Trump will argue that the Afghanistan withdrawal was a complete disaster. He will assert that this is part of the Biden-Harris administration’s record, and even if Kamala Harris was not directly involved in the withdrawal decisions, leaving billions of dollars in equipment behind and losing soldiers’ lives makes them unfit to lead as commander-in-chief,” says former New York state legislator and political analyst Joshua Lafazan.

“Trump has used this agreement as a trophy in his presidential accomplishments, arguing that the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan was a necessary step to end a war that, according to him, had dragged on for too long,” said political strategist Sergio Gutierrez.

Regarding Afghanistan, the Harris campaign is tasked with trying to balance the contrasting narratives of Trump’s alleged disrespect for military personnel and the Biden administration’s handling of the end of the 20-year war. The withdrawal from that war is a decision most Americans still approve of, despite the way it was handled, and an attack line that has fallen relatively flat when leveled against Harris.

The good news for the Democratic nominee is that, at least so far, the issue ranks far behind other more pressing concerns around immigration and the economy, according to polls.

“It isn’t as potent a line of attack as the GOP thinks it is,” said Alex Patton, a GOP strategist.