GOP plans to keep voters top of mind in election

US: The Republican leadership of the House Foreign Affairs Committee hinted at a plan to keep the discussion of how America ended its longest war at the forefront of voters’ minds this fall when they released a lengthy report on Monday criticizing the Biden administration’s handling of the U.S. exit from Afghanistan in 2021.

The partisan analysis describes the last several months of civilian and military setbacks that followed Trump’s disengagement agreement with the Taliban in February 2020, which initiated the retreat. After around eighteen months, the Afghan government collapsed so quickly that even U.S. intelligence services were shocked. The Taliban was able to take over Kabul even before the final American officials left.

Thirteen U.S. military men perished in a suicide bombing outside the major airport as a consequence of the evacuation, which also produced chaotic scenes that were shown on television throughout the globe. That was the start of President Joe Biden’s long and gradual fall in the polls, which ultimately compelled him to resign from office at the request of other party leaders.

The House report, which was spearheaded by Texas Representative Michael McCaul, concludes a three-year probe that included contentious public hearings and disagreements with top Biden officials on document access. Despite this, it does not provide any new material.

The report’s release coincides with House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s hosting of the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony, which honors the 13 fallen service members and their families, the day before Harris and Trump’s first presidential debate.

The two highest-ranking Democrats in Congress, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, are anticipated to attend the event, which takes place only hours before the focus turns to the Philadelphia debate stage.

The House GOP is now attempting to bring attention to Kamala Harris’ involvement in the withdrawal, portraying her as a crucial figure in its disastrous implementation after previously focusing on Biden and his senior aides. In the executive summary alone of the McCaul report, Harris’ name appears 28 times, compared to Trump’s two citations. This report makes many references to the “Biden-Harris administration.”

Trump and his Republican supporters have been attempting to tie Harris to the tumultuous events of August 2021, almost since she emerged as the Democratic candidate. The vice president claimed to be the “last person in the room” when Biden made the decision to withdraw the soldiers, something that the Trump campaign has brought up several times.

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

In a statement, House Democrats said that Republicans were using the inquiry as a political tool against the Harris-Walz ticket and claimed that the report written by their Republican colleagues disregarded information on Trump’s involvement.

McCaul’s group refutes the accusations

“President Biden inherited an untenable position because of the bad deal former President Trump cut with the Taliban to get out of Afghanistan by May of 2021,” the White House said in a statement denouncing the story and placing the burden squarely back on Trump.

There was enough responsibility to go around for four presidential administrations starting with the Bush White House, which started the war after 9/11, according to a number of other examinations investigating the retreat.

According to Trump campaign strategist Jason Miller, “she owns every failure of the Biden-Harris administration,” during a news conference on Monday. “Biden has no authority over anything. I doubt he even knows how to tie his own shoes.”

Harris’s campaign made a swift response. “Trump shamelessly attacks the Vice President because he hopes to trick the country into forgetting that his own actions undermined U.S. strategy and put our troops and allies in harm’s way,” said Morgan Finkelstein, the national security spokesman for Harris-Walz.

Donald Trump, for his part, has been critical of the drawdown from Afghanistan even before Harris was announced as the candidate, seeing it as a political yardstick he could use to discredit Biden. The former said that the withdrawal “set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world” in a recent address to National Guard soldiers in Detroit.

Additionally, Trump has said that Biden and Harris were personally responsible for the suicide bombing at the Kabul airport that claimed the lives of 13 US military men, “just like they pulled the trigger.”

Trump emphasized this issue last month when he paid a visit to the Arlington National Cemetery tomb of a Marine killed in the assault as part of a campaign event. The Harris campaign and a few veterans harshly criticized the action, pointing out that Trump had broken cemetery rules prohibiting election-related activity there. The dispute intensified as a fight broke out between a Trump supporter and a cemetery administrator over permission for filming.

Harris first claimed that Trump was pulling out a “political stunt,” but this claim was later refuted by the Trump campaign when it was revealed that the former president had been invited to the ceremony by the families of the deceased servicemen.

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

According to analysts contacted by media reports, the Biden administration’s low point was undoubtedly the departure from Afghanistan.

“Trump is going to claim that the pullout from Afghanistan was a total failure. Joshua Lafazan, a former state legislator from New York and political analyst, says, “He will argue 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.”

“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 consultant Sergio Gutierrez.

The Harris team has been entrusted with attempting to strike a balance between the opposing narratives surrounding the Biden administration’s handling of the 20-year war’s conclusion and Trump’s purported disregard for service soldiers in Afghanistan. Despite the way it was handled, the choice to withdraw from that war is one that the majority of Americans still support. Harris has been subjected to criticism that hasn’t really held up.

Polls show that, for the time being at least, the issue is significantly less important than other, more urgent worries like immigration and the economy, which is excellent news for the Democratic candidate.

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