Chairman Michael McCaul and the House Foreign Affairs Committee have been investigating the Biden-Harris Administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, but, as part of that inquiry, McCaul decided to absolve U.S. military commanders of responsibility. I recently resigned as a senior investigator on the Committee in part because I believe it is incontrovertible that military brass like General Mark Milley and General Frank McKenzie share blame for what went wrong in August 2021. McCaul doesn’t agree. He is wrong.

McCaul’s deliberate decision to deflect from the failures of U.S. military commanders is perhaps best illustrated by a phone call McCaul had with Milley and McKenzie just ahead of the Committee’s public hearing with them.

“I’m trying to protect you a little bit,” McCaul told McKenzie on that call (as I openly took notes), alluding to the righteous indignation of the Gold Star families at the military’s lack of candor.

McCaul told the generals at the start of the call, conducted on speakerphone in his private office, that he had told other members of Congress that he would “use the gavel” if any of the congressional questions did not “show proper respect” to Milley and McKenzie.

The Chairman also previewed to the generals all the questions he planned on asking them — telling them he was doing so “so there are no surprises.” Can you imagine a prosecutor helping a defendant prepare for his defense? Well, that’s exactly what former federal prosecutor McCaul did. 

McCaul said he would be asking McKenzie about his decision to turn down the Taliban’s offer in Doha on August 15, 2021, which would have kept Taliban forces out of Kabul and allowed the U.S. to secure the city — a baffling decision by McKenzie, which, in my view, greenlit the Taliban’s final conquest of the Afghan capital. McCaul immediately began supplying McKenzie with excuses the general could use during the hearing, telling him, “I know you had a lot of constraints on troop forces. … My understanding is the restraints you had from the orders that you were given to follow that you just didn’t have the troop presence to even fulfill that even if it was a serious offer.”

And McCaul made it abundantly clear to the two generals that he would be letting them skate from accountability: “As I’ve talked to you before, General Milley, you know, that’s where the facts are leading us, that this is not so much a DOD failure — it was a State Department and White House failure.” At the end of the call, McCaul told Milley and McKenzie that “I know that what happened in Afghanistan does not rest on your shoulders but rather on others in the administration.”

Our men and women in uniform charge headfirst into danger. Yet here was McCaul, helping the top brass run away from it.

From the start, I had made it clear these men held a large amount of knowledge only they were privy to, and that the best practice would be to bring them both in for individual transcribed interviews and then to hold separate public hearings with them. Instead, at the insistence of the generals, McCaul initially (and quite pathetically) agreed to allow the men to appear together and only in a classified space — meaning that little to none of what the generals would have told the Committee could ever have been made public. After pushback from the Gold Star families (and from me), McCaul relented just a bit and agreed to hold a joint public hearing with the two men. But McCaul refused to pursue individual transcribed interviews or even individual hearings with the generals, which meant that what the Committee was able to get out of the hearing was limited by time constraints — and, of course, by McCaul’s desire to absolve the generals of responsibility. 

Other self-inflicted problems with the Milley-McKenzie hearing soon arose, especially with further absurd and special accommodations McCaul made for the generals. The hearing was initially announced in a public press release with one of the hearing titles I had proposed and that McCaul had signed off on: “A ‘Strategic Failure’: Biden’s Withdrawal, America’s Generals, and the Taliban Takeover.” 

But Milley — who had misjudged the speed of the Taliban offensive and misled about the size of the Afghan military in 2021 — quickly reached out to McCaul to complain that that hearing title held him at least partly responsible for the debacle in Afghanistan. Well, yes, I thought that was the point. But following Milley’s complaints, McCaul agreed to swap the hearing title, changing it to “An Assessment of the Biden Administration’s Withdrawal from Afghanistan by America’s Generals” — wording which signaled McCaul wanted to let the generals off the hook.

It is no wonder, then, with such an obsequious approach by McCaul, that the Milley and McKenzie hearing largely failed to hold the generals accountable. Indeed, McCaul had designed it to do the opposite.

I had proposed dozens of questions to be presented to members of Congress with the hope that they would then pose them to Milley and McKenzie, but many of the questions were cut beforehand. After the hearing, I then proposed sending dozens of questions in writing to Milley and McKenzie, but it never happened.

The Milley-McKenzie debacle was part of a broader pattern.

McCaul’s agreement early in my tenure to interview Lieutenant Colonel Brad Whited (a key military officer during the evacuation in August 2021) in a classified setting with no transcription of the conversation was a terribly misguided decision. There was instant confusion and disagreement afterward about much of what Whited had been asked and what the officer had said in response, and the truth of it probably never left that SCIF.

For months, I repeatedly called upon the Committee to pursue transcribed interviews with key military figures such as Rear Admiral Peter Vasely, Major General Chris Donahue, Brigadier General Farrell Sullivan, TRANSCOM Commander General Stephen Lyons, and Army Major General Curtis Buzzard — but the Committee refused to pursue any of these witnesses in a serious way, despite the knowledge these men hold about the retrograde and evacuation.

I also requested we pursue testimony from other key U.S. service members who could shed further light on the evacuation and the Abbey Gate bombing, but again, it never happened. I compiled dozens of questions that military commanders should have been asked, and I laid out numerous facts about the U.S. retrograde and the Taliban takeover that needed to be elicited from the Pentagon. The Committee refused to do any of it.

Despite his public vows as chairman to the Gold Star families, McCaul and his Committee failed to properly investigate key aspects of the ISIS-K suicide bombing and of the U.S. reliance on the Taliban during the evacuation. 

Troublingly, CENTCOM’s internal investigations of the Abbey Gate bombing touted conclusions that were not fully supported by the facts or were otherwise designed to deflect blame or whitewash what had happened.

This year, CENTCOM provided the Committee with a Member-level briefing on its Abbey Gate review in a classified space — meaning little, if any, of the info gleaned can be made public. I repeatedly argued that the CENTCOM investigators should provide an unclassified and transcribed briefing on the Abbey Gate bombing — and that I and others be allowed to press them on unresolved questions — but this request was never really pursued.

McCaul refused to hold CENTCOM’s feet to the fire, allowing himself to be spun by CENTCOM behind closed doors and repeatedly saying he agreed with CENTCOM’s problematic assertions.

For months, I pressed to send CENTCOM and the Pentagon numerous detailed questions on the NEO, the Abbey Gate bombing, the U.S. military’s reliance upon the Taliban to provide security at HKIA, intelligence on ISIS-K, and much more — but my requests were rejected.

The GOP-led House Armed Services Committee has also refused to investigate these matters itself — and it was often recalcitrant and even hostile toward assisting in the House Foreign Affairs Committee investigation, but that was no excuse for inaction on McCaul’s part.

For example, during a meeting between staff from the two committees last year, a senior staffer on the House Armed Services Committee bluntly said, “Chairman Rogers says he will not allow anyone in a uniform to be held responsible for the Abbey Gate attack.” Milley and McKenzie still wore the uniform — meaning the other committee was also declaring that even the highest-ranking U.S. military commanders were beyond reproach.

McCaul’s Committee is now claiming it has been working “hand-in-hand” with the House Armed Services Committee — a claim that lets the other committee off the hook for its own oversight failures, but which also (likely inadvertently) admits the truth that the leaders of both committees have sought to shield America’s top generals from culpability.

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McCaul and his team have been derelict in their duty to pursue answers for the Abbey Gate Gold Star families, to seek the proper Pentagon documents, to bring in the necessary military witnesses, to ask the tough questions of DOD, to pursue the truth without fear or favor, and to do everything in the Committee’s power to ensure that a deadly humiliation and military defeat like this never happens again.

McCaul and the Committee made promises to the Gold Star families and to the American public. Those promises simply have not been kept, in part because McCaul wants the generals who presided over the failure to escape their share of the blame.