This week, Democratic House member Rep. Adam Smith (WA), issued a statement and shared a video sharing his thoughts on President Biden’s approach to our withdrawal from Afghanistan that resulted in the Taliban taking over and thousands of Americans and allies in need of evacuating.
In his statement, which was shared on Friday, Smith, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said that while he agreed with the president that we needed to withdraw from Afghanistan, the execution of the withdrawal was “wholly inadequate” and that we should “scrutinize the intelligence” behind the operation.
“The plan to evacuate civilians was wholly inadequate. In the coming months, we need to examine why it has happened this way and make sure it never happens again. We must also scrutinize the intelligence behind this operation to understand whether it provided any clarity regarding how swiftly the Taliban would move in and what our response should have looked like,” the statement reads. “We stuck with this mission for years to avoid the level of chaos we’re now seeing.”
In a video shared to Twitter, Smith reiterated that the discussions that took place prior to the Afghanistan withdrawal should be examined by Congress.
“We certainly need to take a hard look at the decisions that went into this evacuation and why there wasn’t a better plan on this,” Smith said in the video. “So, you take the military out first and then you take the civilians out? Seems to me that you might want to do that the other way around to make sure that you have adequate protection.”
Smith wrapped up the video saying that the Committee would have a hearing next week. “Mistakes were made here. We have a hearing on Tuesday, a classified brief, where we are going to press the administration on (a) what happened and (b) what they’re doing now to try and get as many people out as possible.”
Watch the video here:
.@RepAdamSmith on the evacuation efforts: "We certainly need to take a hard look at the decisions that went into this evacuation and why there wasn't a better plan on this." pic.twitter.com/cJLx4xvvBW
— The Hill (@thehill) August 21, 2021