A group of “republicans” describe the repercussions of the United States’ exit from Afghanistan as an opportunity to recreate what they tried to succeed in when they took advantage of the “Benghazi” events in 2012, considering this a huge foreign policy mistake, and that it is time for an investigation to obtain the political lessons they need to weaken a popular Democratic president, Joe Biden.
Amid the scenes of the hasty and chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan; several Republican members of Congress have pledged to launch investigations into the withdrawal of the administration of US President Joe Biden, whom they called a “failure”.
“What happened makes the scene in Benghazi look like a microcosm and a lot less serious,” said Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, a member of the Republican leadership and a member of the Armed Services Committee.
“This could be one of the worst and most dangerous foreign policy and national security disasters in our history,” he told CNN.
While Republicans have so far struggled to undermine Biden’s popularity; Many of them privately see the past week as a turning point and that they have the power to mobilize their base, unlike when they used a congressional investigation into the 2012 attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi to defeat the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who was Secretary of State at the time of the attack.
Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican facing re-election next year, said: “I think this is much worse than the events in Benghazi, and that is beyond doubt.” According to “CNN”.
If the Republican Party regains power in 2022; It appears that House Republicans may create their own select committee, with several lawmakers and Republican aides saying it is almost certain that the Republican Party will launch investigations into Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Thus, with control of the House of Representatives; the subpoena comes, which means Republicans could compel Biden officials to testify at hearings and turn over documents, all in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.
Republicans, who have only been able to send messages to the White House, want to know whether intelligence failures or bad policy decisions led to the failed withdrawal, how the administration plans to ensure Afghanistan does not become a haven for terrorism, whether the White House ignored warnings about how dangerous the situation on the ground was and what It happened to US military planes and weapons they left in Taliban possession, among other things.
In the same way, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was a Republican on the House Inquiry into Benghazi as a representative of Kansas, addressed the House Republicans Conference Thursday morning.
Pompeo, a potential competitor in 2024, explained how the Trump administration would have handled the withdrawal from Afghanistan, arguing that evacuation would not have seen the same chaos unfolding under Biden, and would have made getting Americans out of the country a top priority.
While Republicans did not come up with the idea of a commission to investigate the events in Afghanistan during their convention, several of them have floated the idea publicly, including Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, who heads the largest conservative caucus in the House of Representatives.
