State Department sends Congress 300 more Afghanistan withdrawal docs

WASHINGTON — The House Foreign Affairs Committee said Thursday it had received 300 additional documents from the State Department related to the chaotic, deadly 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The documents were sent after Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) spoke with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

During that phone call, McCaul said, Blinken “promised more regular production of documents … related to our investigation into the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

“I appreciate the secretary’s commitment to me to provide more regular document production going forward and hope he is true to his word on that,” the lawmaker said in a statement to The Post. “Time is of the essence and we owe our veterans and our Gold Star families answers.”

McCaul has pestered the State Department for months to release more information to aid in his committee’s review of the disastrous pullout, during which 13 US troops died when an ISIS-K suicide bomber detonated an explosive vest outside the Kabul airport on Aug. 26, 2021.

The committee is reviewing the newly released documents, which so far appear only to include situation report memos from the Afghanistan Task Force from mid-July through the end of September 2021, a source with knowledge of the dump told The Post.

That time period matches when the US first began evacuation efforts, which picked up dramatically in mid-August when the Taliban overthrew the government of Afghanistan. The documents are said to mainly focus on those efforts, including tallies of the number of individuals the US got out of the country each day.

Much of the information appears to have already been made public, but officials suspect there are some “new nuggets” to be gleaned, the source added

The documents do not include eight memoranda from the department’s Afghanistan After-Action Review, which the committee had initially requested by July 25 before pushing the deadline back to Aug. 15.

The committee intends to again call on the department to release those documents, the source told The Post.

The new documents come after McCaul and the department fought over the full release of a “dissent cable” written by diplomats who disagreed with the plan to evacuate the country. The committee even issued a subpoena for the cable on March 28.

The cable, written by 23 diplomats, “warned of rapid territorial gains by the Taliban and the subsequent collapse of Afghan security forces and offered recommendations on ways to mitigate the crisis and speed up an evacuation,” the committee said at the time.

However, the State Department was reluctant to release the full four-page document, claiming that doing so would violate the “cherished tradition” of using dissent channels as “a unique way for anyone in the department to speak truth to power as they see it without fear or favor,” in the words of spokesman Vedant Patel.

Following the subpoena, the department ultimately prepared, and briefed McCaul’s committee on, a “roughly” one-page summation of the cable, along with a summary of the agency’s official response “that was just under one page in length,” the Texas Republican said in May.