A senior investigator has resigned from the Republican House Foreign Affairs Committee’s investigation into the Biden administration’s deadly and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, accusing the panel of withholding all its power in analyzing the failures of the US withdrawal.
Jerry Dunleavy, former journalist and author of a book detailing first-person accounts of the evacuation, posted his resignation letter Monday for social platform X. He described himself as a whistleblower, criticizing the committee for suffering from “investigative paralysis.”
“I did not make this decision to resign and publicly denounce this lightly,” Dunleavy wrote in a post accompanying screenshots of his four-page resignation letter.
Efforts to pursue investigative leads have been “repeatedly thwarted by our chief investigator and senior staff and, unfortunately, at times by indecision on your part, Mr. Chairman,” Dunleavy wrote in the letter, referring to the chairman of the Relations Committee. House Exteriors, Michael McCaul (R- Texas).
In a phone call to The Hill, Dunleavy said he was motivated to speak publicly ahead of the November elections to increase the urgency of conducting interviews with key government officials and delving deeper into the accountability of generals and military commanders, while Republicans are still in the majority in the Chamber.
“There is definitely a significant tendency on the part of the president, from the bottom up, to not really seek to hold military commanders and generals accountable for what happened,” Dunleavy said.
He described committee members dealing with retired Gens. Mark Milley and Kenneth McKenzie with “kid gloves” during a hearing in March. Milley served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Trump and Biden administrations, and McKenzie is the former commander of United States Central Command.
Dunleavy further said the committee took “no action” to look into Vice President Harris’ role in the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, saying “I received pushback from my superiors regarding taking action on this.”
“I have repeatedly argued that Vice President Kamala Harris should be held accountable for her role in the disaster in Afghanistan, especially now that she is the Democratic nominee for President of the United States and could soon make national security decisions and direct foreign policy for our entire nation,” Dunleavy wrote in his letter.
Emily Cassil, a spokeswoman for the Republican committee, responded to Dunleavy’s resignation by saying McCaul “poured her heart and soul to get answers for our Gold Star families and Afghanistan veterans” and pointed to the committee’s expected September publication of its report final analyzing the decision-making around the US withdrawal.
Separately, a Republican committee aide rejected Dunleavey’s claim that the vice president was off limits, adding that his role in the withdrawal would be addressed in the September report.
McCaul has made investigating President Biden’s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan a centerpiece of his agenda leading the committee, vowing to uncover how the two-decade war culminated in a deadly and chaotic ending in which 13 U.S. service members were killed in an attack terrorist, along with around 170 Afghan civilians.
But Democrats criticized McCaul for carrying out a partisan investigation that does not examine former President Trump’s role in creating the conditions for the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, as well as the decisions of the previous administrations of Presidents Bush and Obama.
McCaul’s team published an interim report in August 2022 that detailed the administration’s lack of planning and analyzed a series of mistakes and errors that complicated the withdrawal.
The Republican committee’s final report is expected to be based on more than 20 transcribed interviews with administration officials involved in the withdrawal and conclusions drawn from at least five public hearings held throughout the year.
The US military and diplomatic withdrawal from Afghanistan is widely seen as one of the darkest moments of Biden’s presidency. During two tense weeks in August 2021, the US watched as the Taliban advanced in a lightning offensive to take over the country, sweeping through Kabul as the internationally recognized Afghan government and military crumbled.
The administration evacuated about 125,000 people during those two weeks, but tens of thousands of vulnerable Afghans who worked alongside U.S. forces were initially left behind and pathways to immigration to the U.S. were caught in a bureaucratic backlog.
The withdrawal was marked by hectic scenes of civilians storming Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport and departing planes. A deadly terrorist attack by the group ISIS-K left more than a dozen US forces dead.
“I don’t want there to be any more unnecessary Gold Star families in the future,” Dunleavy told The Hill.
“That’s what I worry about: If we don’t seek real accountability and seek real answers here, there will be no lessons learned. There will be no accountability, no one will feel that a major change in mentality is necessary. No one will really absorb the fact that it was a huge loss. We lost a two-decade war and we better take it seriously if we don’t want to lose the next one.”
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
