Rep. Sara Jacobs Says Congress Partially to Blame for Afghanistan Withdrawal By Underfunding State Department and Abdicating War Powers
During a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing today on U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan concluding the longest war in American history, Congresswoman Sara Jacobs (CA-51) said that Congress was partially to blame for systematically underfunding the State Department and abdicating its war powers authority.
Watch Video of Rep. Sara Jacobs Here
Congresswoman Sara Jacobs said:
“Thank you Mr. Chairman. First, I want to thank all of our panelists for your service to our country both if you served in the military, but also for all the work that you did to help get people out of Afghanistan and get them to safety.
“Sergeant Vargas-Andrews, I know that you deployed from Pendleton. I represent the San Diego area and I want to do a special thank you to you for your service and sacrifice. You’ve made our country very proud.
“We’ve talked a lot about the criticisms of how the evacuation happened, and I share many of them. In fact, I was one of the original members of the Honoring our Promises Working Group that my colleague, Mr. Crow co-led, on a bipartisan basis. And my office worked with many of your groups to help get hundreds of Afghans out of Afghanistan and we’re still working to get folks through the SIV process.
“But I think a lot of the criticism that we’ve heard should actually be leveled at this body, at this committee because it’s our job to oversee the State Department. And over the years, we’ve systematically underfunded and underappreciated their work to the point where when we had to do this NEO, the State Department didn’t have the capacity it needed to do the mission we were asking of it.
“I would welcome working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to figure out how we boost State Department funding and capacity and oversight to make sure that the State Department has the capacity it needs in the future – not only for a scenario like this but because we know that diplomacy helps prevent and minimize conflict and we could prevent more situations like this.
“Now, Specialist Gunderson, you said in your testimony that you were born one year before September 11th. I’m not quite as young as you, but I am the youngest person on this dais and I was in middle school when September 11th happened. And we’ve talked a lot about the failure of oversight and the abdication of responsibilities and I want to talk about the abdication of responsibility of this body. Because Congress did not take a single vote on the war in Afghanistan since you were 1 year old and I was 11 years old. That’s 21 years that Congress allowed this war to continue without ever doing our job in oversight to make sure that what we were doing was actually making sense.
“Our generation has been told over and over our entire lives that we’re making gains, that we just needed a little more time, a little more resources, that we were turning a corner. Now, San Diego is one of the largest military communities in the country and we are a large Afghan refugee community as well so I take this very personally. Because we lost more than 2,300 service members and tens of thousands of Afghans over the 20 years and countless more from the trauma they experienced there and my colleague, Mr. Green talked about that so eloquently.
“Watching our troops leave Afghanistan was a stark reminder of the costs of two decades of war, but it was also a stark reminder of how we got there, of the many, many years where we had military leaders come in front of us, and tell us we just need a little more resources, a little more time, we’re turning a corner. But they were telling the public that we were winning when privately our military leaders knew that was never going to be possible.
“Mr. Lucier, you wrote about this so poignantly in an op-ed in The Washington Post in December of 2019, and Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to enter his op-ed into the record.
Mr. Chairman: “Without objection, so ordered.”
Congresswoman Sara Jacobs continued:
“I want to read a few sentences from it… ‘despite knowledge at the top that little progress was being made in Afghanistan, that victory was never likely and that the entire enterprise seemed to be fatally mismanaged, that isn’t the story that the government or the military told the public….Instead, time and time again, officials talked about how local forces were getting better, how it was impossible for the Taliban to win this fight and the infamous sound bite that American forces always seemed to be “turning a corner” in Afghanistan.
“And my last quote from this ‘The inability of top officials to tell the truth made it harder for me to come home from war.’
“Now, Mr. Lucier, following on the Ranking Member’s question, do you think the outcome would have been different if we had stayed 2, 5, or 10 more years, and I know we talked about the mental health consequences of this retrograde on service members, and I feel that personally, I do, but can you speak to the mental health implications of fighting an unwinnable war and how you would have felt as a veteran if we kept sending young people to experience those horrifying things while knowing that we couldn’t win?”
In response, Peter Lucier, Team America Relief, said:
“Yes, Ma’am, thank you. It’s a difficult question. I spoke out in favor of bringing that war to an end because of exactly my experiences. It was difficult to continue to watch the news in a small byline somewhere because Afghanistan wasn’t at the time making a lot of headlines. To see a KIA over there and text your friends, ‘Do we know who it is yet? And is it someone I know?’ It was an odd way to experience the war that I left in 2012 for it to continue to view my life on the news as I was trying to move on and go to school.
“I don’t know what the right answer was to ending that war, but what I do know is the lack of oversight that you cited, that we didn’t have public conversations for the last 20 years, that Congressional hearings on foreign policy writ large and specifically Afghanistan have statistically declined. And that we didn’t have a robust public conversation about the war that I fought and the people we were continuing to deploy to for the 10 years after I got home, when it had already been going on for 10 years, meant that we weren’t as prepared to have a conversation about withdrawal. Because there wasn’t robust record, because there hadn’t been congressional oversight, public discussion, it was a war that at times felt forgotten except for folks like myself, Gold Star families, and Afghans who made it here and it’s worth noting how many had been here, and how many have come here, 70,000 Afghan troops…”
Mr. Chairman: “The gentleman’s time has expired.”
###