GOP Gears Up for Afghanistan Probe

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! Something that we have been missing all of our lives that we didn’t know until now: the Costco food court in Japan—which, in addition to the classic pizza, hot dog, and ice cream offerings—features shrimp bisque and a bulgogi bake. We know where we’re going shopping this weekend.

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: Republicans are chasing the ghosts of Afghanistan still haunting Biden’s foreign policy, how Ukraine’s military learned to fight, and the U.S. intelligence community tries to close the book on Havana syndrome.

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The disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan happened just over 18 months ago, or—to put it another way—approximately 1,900 Washington news cycles ago.

For most Americans following foreign policy, the Afghanistan withdrawal faded into the background as new crises like the war in Ukraine and Chinese spy balloons floating over Montana took the limelight.

But the ghosts of Afghanistan’s past are coming back to haunt Washington in many ways, and there are two big policy “ghosts” that we’re keeping track of at SitRep.

Ghost No. 1: The politics. The first is the realm of Washington politics and policy. A newly empowered Republican Party in the House aims to kick-start a new series of oversight hearings on what exactly went wrong in the final chapter of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Rep. Michael McCaul, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, just announced the first such hearing on March 8, which will feature witnesses from U.S. veterans who led organizations that helped former Afghan allies of the U.S. war effort escape the country.

This hearing follows a damning new government watchdog report released last month. The report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found that poor planning in the abrupt U.S. withdrawal as well as weakness and corruption within the Afghan national security forces led to the rapid collapse of the country and ascension of the Taliban.

The stream of new watchdog reports and public hearings will ramp up pressure on U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration to dig deeper on what went wrong in Afghanistan and could put top Biden officials in the political crosshairs as Republicans demand more accountability.

Ghost No. 2: The blowback. The second “ghost” is in the realm of long-term blowback from the chaotic U.S. withdrawal.

Multiple current and former U.S. officials have told us that the Biden administration’s aims of keeping so-called over-the-horizon capabilities—disrupting and dismantling terrorist plots and networks in Afghanistan from afar with drone strikes and signals intelligence without having anyone on the ground—doesn’t amount to much more than wishful thinking.

(The one counterpoint that administration officials often point to is the U.S. assassination of al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in July 2022. He was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Kabul.)

Then there’s the question of what happens to the $7 billion worth of U.S. arms, munitions, and high-end military equipment that the United States so generously left behind in Afghanistan for the Taliban to grab up.

Last February, Latifullah Hakimi, a top Taliban leader tasked with overseeing the militant group’s military transformation, boasted in a news conference that the Taliban had captured 300,000 light arms, 26,000 heavy weapons, and about 61,000 military vehicles when they took control of the country.

An army of hand-me-downs. “We didn’t just leave people behind. We left equipment for an entire army behind,” said Nathan Sales, the former top counterterrorism envoy under the Trump administration.

Sales spoke to SitRep and a group of reporters at an event this week organized by the Vandenberg Coalition, a right-leaning foreign-policy nonprofit organization.

“I don’t think we’ve even begun to think about the consequences of what that is going to mean,” Sales said. “I’m not just worried about those weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, although I am worried about that. Think about Russian arms dealers buying them on the black market. Think about Mexican drug cartels getting ahold of these right on our border.”

“It’s not a far-fetched scenario to think that we will be encountering adversaries … wielding our own weapons against us for decades to come,” Sales added.

The human toll. This is to say nothing of Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis, eclipsed in attention and finances by other pressing humanitarian crises around the world, from Ukraine to Syria to the Horn of Africa.

Some 28 million Afghans—nearly 70 percent of the country’s entire population—now depend on aid to survive, according to a top U.N. aid official, and if the country’s economic outlook is any indication, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. Afghanistan’s GDP has shrunk by a staggering 35 percent.

Left behind. As another grim coda to this chapter in U.S. foreign policy, we recommend you read this new story from Vice News on Mohammad Ahmadi. Ahmadi was an Afghan colonel who led a group of 2,500 elite Afghan soldiers up until the end of the war and U.S. withdrawal.

Ahmadi was one of thousands of Afghan allies that the United States left behind. He fled Taliban rule from Afghanistan to Iran to Brazil—and from there, he traveled north with migrants through Central America to try to reach the U.S. border and gain entry to the country he fought alongside for 13 years.

Biden has tapped Cindy McCain, the widow of late Sen. John McCain, to serve as the next executive director of the World Food Program.

McCain, who endorsed Biden against Trump in 2020 in a sojourn across party lines and helped him flip the key state of Arizona, will take over from former South Carolina Gov. David Beasley, who has been in the job since 2017. McCain is currently the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations’ Agencies in Rome.

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

Practice makes potent. How exactly did Ukraine’s military, once a sprawling and corrupt post-Soviet quagmire, turn into a potent and lethally effective fighting force that is staving off the biggest military invasion Europe has seen since World War II? It’s a decadeslong story, and Jack condensed it all down into one single deep dive. It’s well worth a read, if we do say so ourselves.

UNsustainable. The United Nations is in the midst of a massive crisis of confidence brought on by the war in Ukraine, as Moscow paralyzes action on the U.N. Security Council by using its permanent veto power and Ukraine’s allies struggle to get the broader U.N. General Assembly on board with actions beyond just condemning Russia’s invasion.

Can Ukraine rally more support in the international body as the war grinds on? Can Washington find a way to outmaneuver Moscow in the corridors of power at the U.N.? At this point, does that really even matter? Read all about it.

Havana syndrome. Was it a foreign adversary? Was it an energy weapon? No, U.S. intelligence agencies said. In a yearslong review, seven American spy agencies found that the mysterious Havana syndrome ailment impacting U.S. diplomats was not likely caused by a foreign adversary, like Russia, and found no pattern that could link the roughly 1,000 cases they examined.

Not everyone is happy. “They feel betrayed,” national security lawyer Mark Zaid told CNN of the reaction from the victims. “[I]t’s hard to accept it was caused by AC units & loud cicadas,” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted.

Snapshot 

An F-22 Raptor flies during a solo handling display in Avalon, Australia, on Feb. 28.Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images

Today: The G-20 wraps up a foreign ministers’ forum in India. One awkward run-in at the meeting: a tense 10-minute powwow between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, where Blinken pushed the Kremlin to implement the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (which Russia has suspended), release Paul Whelan (who Russia has detained for more than four years), and sue for peace in Ukraine (a year and a week after the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion). Tough job.

Friday, March 3: Biden is set to welcome German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to the White House, just a week after German Leopard tanks began showing up in Ukraine (that first delivery courtesy of Poland).

“You can’t do what they’ve done, which is to basically take what was a semi-functional state and destroy it, essentially, by putting a bunch of illiterate cave-dwelling members of a medieval death cult and put them in charge of governing a country.”

– Kelley Currie, former U.S. ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues, tells a room full of journalists (including Robbie and Jack) at a seminar organized by the right-leaning Vandenberg Coalition on Wednesday, saying the outcome of the Taliban’s year-plus in charge of Afghanistan has been … predictable. 

Is there anybody out there? In 1977, then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter—who began receiving end-of-life care last month—sent the NASA space probe Voyager 1 out of Earth’s atmosphere with a message to future galaxies far, far away. “This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings,” Carter wrote. “We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.”

More than 45 years later, Voyager 1 is still out there. It’s made flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, and Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. It will be taking recordings at least until 2025, when its generators may no longer be able to power its scientific instruments on board.

Unleash the art. Ukrainian defense intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov has a secret weapon in his office: a badass painting of an enormous owl carrying a bat through the sky. Kudos to the Pulitzer Prize-winning ace New York Times reporter David Philipps for spotting it.