Why I Resigned From Investigation Into Afghanistan Debacle

Dear Chairman McCaul,

I wish to provide a formal explanation for my resignation from my position as a senior investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s investigation into the Biden-Harris Administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. My resignation is effective today. I am grateful for being asked to serve in this role for the past year.

I believe the Committee’s work has been important and the investigation has repeatedly uncovered evidence further solidifying the undeniable fact that the dangerous decision by President Biden — one strongly supported by Vice President Harris — to fully and rapidly pull out all U.S. troops from Afghanistan with no plan for how to deal with the inevitable fallout was a deadly disaster. The investigation has further reinforced that the Biden-Harris Administration’s cascade of bad decisions in 2021 led to the Afghan government’s collapse, the Taliban’s conquest of the country, the deaths of 13 U.S. service members at Abbey Gate, the abandonment of hundreds of Americans and tens of thousands of Afghan allies, and a rise in terrorism — and the investigation has reinforced the fact that the Biden-Harris Administration’s disaster has led to a more dangerous world.

Even as I applaud the Committee’s successes, many of which have come because of your continued leadership on this issue, I must also recognize and highlight the investigation’s faults, particularly the missed opportunities resulting from the Committee’s unwillingness or inability to pursue critical testimony and from its failure to go down key investigative avenues. I believe this has done a great disservice to the Committee’s mission statement. And I believe that the quest for truth desired by the American people, and more tragically by the Gold Star families, has been hurt by this investigative paralysis.

When I was asked to join the Committee as a senior investigator after reporting on and writing a book on the debacle in Afghanistan, I made it clear that I believed the Committee’s investigation should be sweeping in scope and should pursue every lead possible. I was told by you, Mr. Chairman, as well as by senior staff, that everyone was in agreement on this. My view, then and now, was that the Biden-Harris withdrawal from Afghanistan was a diplomatic failure, an intelligence failure, a military failure, a strategic failure, a policy failure, a planning failure, a political failure, a truth-telling failure, and a moral failure — but above all a leadership failure by President Biden. And I believe that all aspects of that failure should be investigated.

Yet my efforts to fully pursue investigative leads have been repeatedly stymied by our chief investigator and by senior staff, and, unfortunately, sometimes by indecision from you, Mr. Chairman. What I am about to lay out should not be considered comprehensive — it is merely meant to highlight a number of ways in which I believe the Committee has allowed members of the Biden-Harris Administration to avoid deserved scrutiny. I am writing this not to criticize the Committee, but to help the Committee see the flaws in its investigation so it can take advantage of the remaining months left in the 118th Congress.

While the Committee has interviewed an impressive number of State Department witnesses and has extracted devastating testimony from them, there has been a repeated refusal to ask to interview a number of key high-ranking witnesses from that Department, despite my urging. Those who have been allowed to escape such scrutiny include: Ambassador Tracey Jacobson, then the State Department Afghanistan Coordination Task Force and now the nominee to become Ambassador to Iraq; Wendy Sherman, the now-former Deputy Secretary of State; and Victoria Nuland, the now-former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. There are also a number of key State Department documents that our Committee has refused to request despite my repeated urging. All of these interviews and documents should still be requested.

My repeated and monthslong requests to pursue testimony from Russ Travers (the now-former Senior Deputy Homeland Security Advisor for the NSC who was a signer of the Hunter Biden laptop letter and played a key role in the Biden-Harris Administration’s failed handling of the SIV process) and from USAID Administrator Samantha Power have also been rejected. The Committee should still seek to bring these witnesses in.

For months, I have also repeatedly requested that the Committee pursue transcribed interviews with key military figures such as Rear Admiral Vasely, Major General Chris Donahue, Brigadier General Farrell Sullivan, TRANSCOM Commander General Stephen Lyons, and Army Major General Curtis Buzzard — but this has also not happened. I have also requested that we pursue testimony from other key U.S. military figures and U.S. service members who could also shed further light on the NEO, on U.S. interactions with the Taliban, and on the Abbey Gate bombing, but this has similarly never happened. I have compiled dozens of questions that military commanders should be asked. I have also laid out a host of documents that we should request from the Pentagon — a request similarly rejected or ignored by senior staff. All of these witnesses and documents should still be requested.

Despite your public vows as Chairman to the Abbey Gate Gold Star families, and despite our private promises to the families, the Committee has failed to properly investigate all aspects of the ISIS-K suicide bombing and of the U.S. reliance on the Taliban to provide security at HKIA during the NEO. I believe that CENTCOM’s initial investigation and supplemental review of the Abbey Gate bombing, while revealing some key facts and riveting testimony, also contained conclusions which were not fully supported by the facts or were otherwise designed to deflect blame or whitewash what had happened.

CENTCOM provided the Committee with a Member-level briefing on its supplemental Abbey Gate review in a classified space — meaning little, if any, of the info gleaned can be made public. I have repeatedly argued that the CENTCOM investigators should provide an unclassified and transcribed briefing on the Abbey Gate bombing — and that I and others be allowed to press them on a host of unresolved questions — but this request for a publicly-accessible Q&A session was never pursued by our chief investigator nor by senior staff. For many months, I have pressed our chief investigator to send CENTCOM and the Department of Defense a list of dozens of detailed questions on the NEO, the Abbey Gate bombing, the U.S. military’s reliance upon the Taliban to provide security at HKIA, intelligence on ISIS-K, and much more — but my requests have been rejected.

While writing my book and subsequently serving on this Committee, I have come to know and respect many of the Gold Star families and a number of the U.S. troops who bravely and heroically served on the ground during the NEO. As Chairman, you made promises to the Gold Star families about relentlessly pursuing answers for them, and as Committee staff we made private promises to the families echoing the same. The Committee’s investigation simply has not lived up to those promises. But it is not too late to ask the questions and bring in the witnesses that I have repeatedly suggested.

The House Armed Services Committee has failed to investigate these matters itself, and has often been slow and reluctant to assist our own Committee, but that is no excuse for inaction on our part.

Additionally, I believe that the Committee’s agreement to interview Lieutenant Colonel Brad Whited (a key military officer during the NEO in August 2021) in a classified setting with no transcription of the conversation caused instant confusion and disagreement afterward about some of what the military officer had even said. Without a record of the exchange, the contents of his testimony may never be fully known, and the classified setting also limits what can be shared publicly.

I have also advocated for months that our Committee team up with other Committees on joint letters related to the debacle in Afghanistan. I proposed a joint letter with House Oversight related to who was evacuated during the NEO, vetting procedures, and other topics; a joint letter with House Judiciary on the FBI’s purported investigation into the Abbey Gate bombing and into the Abbey Gate bomber; and a joint letter with House Intel to request the U.S. intelligence products from 2021 which assessed the sustainability of the Afghan government, the likelihood of a Taliban takeover, and a host of other subjects. All of my proposals here were ignored or rejected by our chief investigator. Nevertheless, the Committee should still pursue these.

I believe the Committee has also erred in its approach to some of the State Department witnesses that we did bring in — including repeatedly not including key questions that I proposed for these witnesses (while almost always failing to provide any explanation for why these questions were cut) and failing to properly follow-up on holding these witnesses accountable.

After conducting a transcribed interview with Ambassador Ross Wilson, the final U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, I strongly believed that Wilson should be brought in for a full public hearing, given the multitude of failures he was responsible for after being retained in his position by President Biden. Initially, there was agreement within the Committee to bring him in for a hearing, but then senior staff reversed themselves. Eventually, I was told by our chief investigator that bringing in Ross Wilson would make us look like bullies. I could not disagree more; Ambassador Wilson had more than earned his time in the hot seat in front of Congress, and a public accounting is not bullying. The Committee can and should still bring him in for a hearing.

After conducting a transcribed interview with Zalmay Khalilzad, the former Special Representative for Afghan Reconciliation, it became clearer than ever to me how dishonest Khalilzad continued to be about the nature of the Taliban and about his actions as a negotiator in Doha. But in the lead up to the follow-on public hearing, our chief investigator briefed congressional staff that Khalilzad had been the most honest of all the witnesses we had interviewed up until then — a statement I found as alarming as it was untrue. Unfortunately, this gave the strong (and wrong) impression to congressional staff that Khalilzad was a friendly witness, a misleading view likely passed along to their Members. This is not the reality regarding Khalilzad. All evidence indicates that Zal is in it for Zal. For the title of the Khalilzad hearing, I suggested ideas such as “Trusting the Taliban” or “The Disaster in Doha” with the goal of highlighting Khalilzad’s role in the debacle. Instead, the Committee went with “Behind the Scenes: How the Biden Administration Failed to Enforce the Doha Agreement.” As I explained at the time, this hearing name would set the wrong tone for questioning, falsely suggesting that Khalilzad bore little responsibility for the catastrophe. It also alarmingly cast the deeply flawed Doha Agreement in a favorable light, rather than using the opportunity to rightly critique the Biden-Harris Administration’s bizarre decision to not only retain the architect of that bad deal but to also double down and put him in charge of ever more high-stakes diplomacy with the Taliban — a decision which ended with the Taliban in charge of Afghanistan. It is true the Biden-Harris Administration utterly failed to enforce even the meager provisions of the Doha deal, even as the Taliban violated each provision, but the hearing with Khalilzad should have been much broader in scope.

The Committee’s framing, in my view, treated Khalilzad gently, when instead the goal should have been to highlight Khalilzad’s mendacity and to hammer the Biden-Harris Administration for keeping him in his diplomatic perch despite his obvious failings in dealing with the Taliban. I believe this made the hearing far less effective than it should have been.

Additionally, an anecdote from moments after the hearing illustrates what I see as the flawed direction of the Committee’s investigation. Just after Khalilzad finished testifying, our chief investigator went up to him on the floor of the hearing room and asked for (and received) a smiling selfie with him in full view of the press and the public — with veterans of the war in Afghanistan and Gold Star families still in the hearing room audience. Given what I and a multitude of others believe to be Khalilzad’s significant role in the end of the Afghan republic, I found such a move to be highly inappropriate and potentially harmful to the optics surrounding our investigation.

After the hearing, I repeatedly urged our chief investigator to send Khalilzad a specific QFR related to a false claim he had made that the Taliban had cooperated with the United States fully during the evacuation — a claim contradicted by a host of evidence, including General McKenzie himself publicly admitting that the U.S. military repeatedly asked the Taliban to search or raid ISIS-K locations during the NEO, with the Taliban sometimes refusing to do so. I believe this QFR was never sent. Despite months passing, the Committee should still send Khalilzad the QFR that I suggested. And I can only urge the Committee to ensure its final report reflects the clear evidence showing Khalilzad’s destructive failures in 2020 and 2021.

As I expressed repeatedly throughout the process, I also have serious problems with the way that the eventual public hearing with General Milley and General McKenzie was handled. From the start, I made it clear that these men held a large amount of knowledge and information that only they were privy to. I advocated for bringing them both in for individual transcribed interviews and then holding separate public hearings with them. Instead, after pushback from the generals, you as Chairman made an initial agreement that would have allowed the men to appear together and only in a classified space — meaning that, if that plan had been realized, little to none of what they would tell the Committee could ever have been made public. After pushback from the Gold Star families (and from me), you wisely relented and the Committee eventually held a joint public hearing with the two men. But the lack of individual transcribed interviews or even individual public hearings meant that what we were able to get out of the hearing was limited by time constraints.

Other self-inflicted problems with the Milley-McKenzie hearing soon arose, especially with further special accommodations we made for the generals. The hearing was initially announced with one of the hearing titles I had proposed and that you as Chairman had signed off on: “A ‘Strategic Failure’: Biden’s Withdrawal, America’s Generals, and the Taliban Takeover.” But, in a stunning accommodation for witnesses and an adjustment that is without precedent as far as I know, the Committee agreed to change the hearing title after General Milley reached out to complain that the title would cast some blame on him for the debacle. Although U.S. military commanders absolutely offered more accurate assessments of the risks of a full withdrawal in 2021 than those presented by incompetent State Department officials or the NSC, the top military brass is not blameless for what ultimately transpired. But following General Milley’s complaints, the Committee agreed to modify a hearing title which had already been announced, changing it to “An Assessment of the Biden Administration’s Withdrawal from Afghanistan by America’s Generals” — wording that clearly signaled the generals bore little to no responsibility for the disaster that unfolded.

Additionally, the Committee allowed the generals to break the Committee’s typical practice of having witnesses submit written testimony prior to the hearing. General Milley did not end up submitting his written testimony until many days after the hearing, and as far as I can tell, General McKenzie never ended up submitting any written testimony at all (despite releasing a book months later which included multiple chapters on Afghanistan).

One further anecdote from the Milley-McKenzie saga is illustrative of the way this investigation has unfortunately been run. General Milley offered to speak with Gold Star family members in person in a side room just before the public hearing, and General McKenzie said he was willing to do so as well. The Committee initially agreed we would have at least one staff member in the room during this conversation between the generals and the families, something the generals were fine with and the families desired. The families then articulated they wanted me specifically in the room with them during their talk with the generals. It was at that point that my superiors suddenly decided that we would not allow any of our staff in the room after all, denying the Committee a chance to support the Gold Star families and listen to their discussion with Milley and McKenzie.

For the hearing, I proposed a host of questions to be presented to Members as suggestions to pose to General Milley and General McKenzie, but many of them were cut by our chief investigator. Months ago, immediately after the hearing, I proposed sending a long series of QFRs to General Milley and General McKenzie, so that we could do our due diligence and still try to get as many answers as possible about the withdrawal and the NEO. Despite my repeated insistence that we send these QFRs to the generals, it never happened. Even though months have lapsed since the hearing, the Committee should still send General Milley and General McKenzie those QFRs. And I again simply urge the Committee to hold the generals accountable for their own significant mistakes, and to document their failings in the Committee’s final report.

Finally, I have argued repeatedly that Vice President Kamala Harris should be held accountable for her role in the debacle in Afghanistan, especially now that she is the Democratic nominee for President of the United States and could soon be making national security decisions and directing foreign policy for our entire nation. Thus far, despite my urging, the Committee has taken zero steps to do so, and I have received pushback from my superiors related to taking action on this.

The record is clear that Vice President Harris says she was involved in President Biden’s disastrous decision-making in 2021, including bragging that she was the last person in the room when President Biden made his foolish Go-to-Zero decision. Despite this, my proposal to question White House press secretary Jen Psaki on the issue of Harris’s involvement was rejected when our chief investigator did not include my related proposed questions in our question outline when we brought Psaki in last month. (Notably, Psaki was the first fact witness brought before our Committee since Harris assumed the mantle of Democratic presidential nominee.) I will also note that my proposed questions related to Psaki’s knowledge about President Biden’s lack of mental fitness for the job were also cut at the insistence of a senior communications staffer.

My other proposals that would attempt to hold Harris accountable, which have been repeatedly submitted to my superiors on the Committee, have been straightforward:

• As the Chairman, you should put out a press release criticizing her for her role in the fiasco. I urged this immediately upon Biden’s announcement that he would not be running for reelection and have urged it repeatedly since then, but for reasons unknown this hasn’t happened.
• As Chairman, you should lead a House resolution condemning her for her role.
• The Committee should send the Vice President a lengthy list of probing questions pressing her on her role in the decision-making process related to Afghanistan throughout 2021.
• The Committee should request transcribed interviews with her top advisers at the time, including: Nancy Eileen McEldowney, Harris’s national security adviser at the time; Philip Gordon, Harris’s deputy national security adviser at the time and now her national security adviser; Hartina “Tina” Flournoy, Harris’s chief of staff at the time; Michael Fuchs, Harris’s deputy chief of staff at the time; Symone Sanders-Townsend, Harris’s chief spokesperson and senior advisor at the time; Ashley Etienne, Harris’s communications director at the time; and Sabrina Singh, Harris’s deputy press secretary at the time and now deputy Pentagon press secretary.

The Committee’s failure to quickly begin holding Vice President Harris accountable for the part she played is befuddling and is more troubling than just being plain bad politics — this is about accountability for the person who desires to be our next Commander-in-Chief even after she, along with President Biden, played a key role in America’s embarrassing retreat and defeat in a twenty-year war. If she is elected, she might be newly emboldened by the belief that her poor decisions and failed actions are without consequences. The disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal is likely to be only a harbinger of the more reckless foreign policy that is to come under a potential Harris-Walz Administration if this matter is not vigorously pursued immediately. Harris simply cannot be allowed to skate on this — and yet, so far, she is indeed skating.

I repeat my thanks at the opportunity to work on this investigation for the Committee, and I offer my compliments to you and the Committee for the efforts that have been undertaken to expose the malfeasance of President Biden’s handling of the withdrawal and evacuation from Afghanistan. Nonetheless, I must also repeat my disappointment with the Committee’s failure to properly and fully hold the Biden-Harris Administration accountable for its failures in 2021 and for the fallout which followed.

I will continue to advocate for answers and accountability because I believe we owe it to the Abbey Gate families, to all Gold Star families, to all the U.S. service members who fought and died over the course of the two-decade war, and to the American public. I fear that America has not learned the lessons from its defeat in the two-decade war in Afghanistan — and I worry that the lack of lessons-learned puts our country in a precarious position in this era of renewed Great Power competition. It was my hope that the Committee’s investigation would aid in the learning of these critical lessons — and that hope remains.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Sincerely,

Jerry Dunleavy

Senior Investigator – House Foreign Affairs Committee

August 9, 2024

Jerry Dunleavy is a former Justice Department and investigative reporter for the Washington Examiner, the co-author of “Kabul: The Untold Story of Biden’s Fiasco and the American Warriors Who Fought to the End,” and a former senior investigator with the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s investigation into the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.