Washington, DC — Representative Gregory W. Meeks, Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, today issued a statement regarding Chairman McCaul’s release of three additional transcripts of closed-door interviews conducted as part of the Committee’s investigation into the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. The three transcripts contain important testimony from former State Department spokesperson Edward “Ned” Price; Chief of Staff Suzy George; and former Acting Under Secretary of State for Management, Ambassador Carol Perez.
"I welcome the release of this next set of transcribed interview transcripts from the Committee's Afghanistan withdrawal investigation, and I look forward to the Chairman honoring his commitment to release the remaining transcripts. These interviews corroborate previously released testimony showing that the State Department had plans in place throughout 2021 to operate post-withdrawal, and the Department was able to quickly plan for and adapt to the dynamic situation on the ground caused by the Afghan government’s sudden collapsed in mid-August of that year. The State Department and its diplomats are regularly tasked with operating in challenging and dangerous environments, where the security situation can turn at any moment; their expertise in such situations and their round-the-clock efforts to facilitate the successful evacuation of over 120,000 people would be celebrated by my Republican colleagues if the President at the time of the evacuation had an 'R' instead of a 'D' next to his name."
Key excerpts from the testimonies can be found here (Perez), here (Price), and here (George). Full transcripts can be found here (Perez), here (Price), and here (George).
Key points from these witnesses include the following:
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Ambassador Perez testified that she personally convened weekly planning calls (p. 65-66) during the year to prepare contingency plans, including “standard practice” for a possible closure of the embassy (p. 85). She described the State Department’s careful focus on ensuring it could maintain a U.S. embassy presence in Kabul to advance U.S. interests there after a U.S. military withdrawal—an aim she understood to be the objective of both the Trump and Biden Administrations (p. 38). She testified to her belief that the Department had the expertise and the preparation to do so safely by the withdrawal deadline, noting State had long operated embassies in Kabul and other war zones around the world and that she was “so impressed” by the expertise shown in this context (p. 96).
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Price and George, both of whom joined the State Department at the onset of the Biden Administration, described concerns that there was “not sufficient planning” done (George, p. 21) and “not a plan that was on the shelf” (Price, p. 31) left by the Trump Administration to prepare for the withdrawal it had begun as part of the Doha Deal—a deal that Price described as “not a deal that this [Biden] administration would have struck with the Taliban. I think personally it was an erratic policy. It was a policy that wasn’t moored to national interests. I think it, unfortunately, was moored to something else. And it was a policy that left the incoming administration with no good options.” (p. 30) Price also testified to the concern that American soldiers in Afghanistan “could have a target on their back once again” (p. 33) if the agreement with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops were rescinded.
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Price described how, even as the Taliban was making gains into August 2021, he believed that the United States had “a responsibility to exhaust every single avenue to arrive at an outcome that would have been undeniably in America’s national security interests, in the interests of the Afghan people” by continuing to press diplomatically in Kabul for a negotiated peace among Afghans (p. 92) and that “the situation on the ground changed markedly” after August 14 and by then Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s decision to flee the country.