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Opinion GOP reaction to troop deaths shows what a Republican House would really mean

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

Soon after the nation received the terrible news about the killing of 13 U.S. service members in Afghanistan, some Republicans immediately called for President Biden’s resignation. Others refrained from that, instead signaling that once back in power, they will launch major congressional investigations into what happened.

Congressional oversight into the failures of the withdrawal is indeed a must. But we should be clear on what Republicans really mean when they say this.

If Republicans take back the House, it will go a long way toward ensuring that we do not get anything close to full accountability for the Afghanistan debacle. They will deliberately circumscribe their investigations to limit them to only the culpability of the Biden administration.

This places big obligations on Democrats. While they control Congress, they should launch much broader investigations into the entire 20-year disaster. Unfortunately, the horrible news might leave them so politically fearful that they insist on a narrower accounting to show distance from Biden.

The true GOP intentions are clear from this new CNN report on a conference call among House Republicans on Thursday. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told them that calling for Biden’s resignation is counterproductive. Instead, they should sit tight for big investigations later:

“Promise you there is going to be a reckoning,” McCarthy, who spoke to Biden by phone on Thursday, told members on the GOP conference call, according to sources. “We are going to hold every single person accountable.”

McCarthy also told an NBC reporter that if Republicans win the House, there will be multiple committee investigations into various aspects of the withdrawal.

You might recall that McCarthy famously exulted in 2015 that GOP Benghazi investigations were a success because Hillary Clinton’s “numbers are dropping.” We know this is exactly what would animate House GOP investigations into the Afghanistan withdrawal.

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A key tell in this regard comes from Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), a member of GOP leadership. She declared that the deaths were “solely" due to Biden’s "incompetent leadership.”

Solely. There you have it: Republicans would focus investigations only on the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal, to make sure his “numbers are dropping” before the 2024 presidential race.

Let’s be clear: The administration’s withdrawal should be the subject of congressional inquiries. We need to know whether intelligence failed to adequately register the likelihood of a quick collapse by the Afghan government and army, or whether decisions were made in spite of what the intelligence got right. We need to know about failings in the process granting visas to Afghan refugees. And much more.

But looking only at these things would be insufficient. Surely a genuine reckoning into what we’re seeing now would take as its premise that it is the outgrowth of a much broader series of mistakes and failures.

“There’s great danger in zeroing in only on the decisions of the last few months,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, told me. “That’s politically convenient for Republicans. But it absolves an enormous set of decisions that got us to this point.”

What’s more, Murphy points out, this would invite “scrutiny only of war withdrawals, which is a pretty dangerous precedent to set.”

What might a broader accounting look like?

“First you have to ask, was there an alternative to an occupation?” Murphy told me. “Second, once it was clear that the Afghan military couldn’t stand on their own, why didn’t we start planning for withdrawal immediately?”

“It became clear early on that our training missions weren’t working,” Murphy continued. "So even during the first decade of the war, more questions should have been raised about whether the training missions were ever going to succeed.”

James Dobbins, a State Department special envoy during the Bush and Obama administrations, notes a real accounting could also look at why the United States didn’t accept the Taliban’s offer of a surrender soon after the United States’ swift routing of the group.

“Among the things Congress should look at is the early rejection of the Taliban’s offer, and the subsequent treatment of Taliban figures that were willing to work within the new system and were imprisoned for years,” Dobbins told me.

That could reckon with something even bigger: the susceptibility of key decision-makers to letting “anger over 9/11” preclude that possibility, Dobbins said. He added that Congress could investigate why officials never debated the possibility of a Taliban comeback, which is what happened.

Meanwhile, Arash Azizzada of Afghans for a Better Tomorrow says a full reckoning could examine why so many Afghan civilians died during our occupation. “The withdrawal has been executed as poorly as the occupation has been executed for the last 20 years,” he told me.

Still another possibility might be to look at why Congress so readily ceded so much warmaking authority to presidents throughout that period, a failure that goes back decades but had particularly terrible results during the global war on terrorism.

“Congress has to look at themselves,” Pam Campos-Palma, a defense council member at the Truman National Security Project, told me. A key component of this, she said, is why lawmakers “blindly accept the word of generals.” Importantly, this would target lawmakers “who have been there the longest.”

Which might be one reason this doesn’t happen. But it still should.

Yet here’s the thing: This very well might be our last chance to have a real reckoning with one of our greatest debacles. If Republicans take over the House — or, worse, both chambers — you can forget about any such accounting ever happening.

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