WASHINGTON, UNITED STATES – Tim Sheehy, a former US Navy SEAL and candidate for the US Senate, has criticized the US House Foreign Affairs Committee investigation into the country’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
During an interview with Fox News on Tuesday, March 25, Mr. Sheehy, who has also served in Afghanistan, stated that the congressional hearings on the “very poorly” executed withdrawal from Afghanistan indicate that there remains no accountability which sends a message of weakness around the world.
“We don’t seem to have learned from that incident, and accountability has not yet been restored. We haven’t had any generals get fired. No secretaries of state or defense get relieved. No one’s been held accountable for that abject failure. And this hearing just proves that,” he said.
The U.S. troop pullout in August 2021 led to the swift collapse of the republic government and military, entities which the U.S. and its allies had supported for nearly two decades, ultimately facilitated the return to power of the Taliban.
“Since what’s happened there, with obviously the Taliban flying our helicopters all over the country, taking our weapons, we sent a message of weakness around the world,” Sheehy said.
During the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, a suicide bombing at Kabul Airport killed 13 US service members and 170 Afghan civilians, an attack later claimed by the Islamic State – Khorasan Province (IS-KP).
Since then the Republican-led Congress has constantly criticized the Biden Administration for its handling of Afghanistan, especially the chaotic withdrawal of troops that led to the return of the radical Islamist regime to power.
In early last year, the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, under the leadership of Michael McCaul, initiated an investigation into the country’s military withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he previously characterized as a “mistake of epic proportions.”
The investigation, as Mr. McCaul said earlier, is necessary for the American people to receive transparency and answers they deserve from those US officials involved in the planning and execution of the withdrawal.
The Chairman of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee also pledged to hold people accountable for the handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Since that time, the committee has been arranging hearings and testimonies from individuals involved in the withdrawal, including Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, special envoys for Afghanistan, and the country’s top generals.
Last week, the committee heard testimony from the two US generals who oversaw the withdrawal: General Mark Milley, the former Chairman of the US Joint Staff, and General Frank McKenzie, the former commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM), regarding the Biden administration’s deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Both generals acknowledged that more could have been done to prevent the chaos that happened during the withdrawal. They admitted that “the fundamental mistake, the fundamental flaw, was the timing of the State Department call” for the evacuation of US citizens who remained in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
“There’s a long list of things that could have been done. And I think the first thing you’ll hear from a lot of these military officers is that they were overridden by the administration and the recommendations they made,” the former US navy said.
“And we shouldn’t have been telling everyone around the entire world we’re going to be sent out by the state. Tactically, this was handled very poorly. And the people on the ground who knew how to do this properly from a tactical perspective, were not listened to.”
