Republicans work to put Afghanistan at center of election cycle

Three years after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Democrats and Republicans are launching a fresh wave of attacks and counterattacks on who is to blame for the debacle, all with an eye toward the November ballot.

The battle of the “who screwed up Afghanistan” narrative is playing out across Washington in the form of congressional investigations, cable news hits and statements from campaign proxies.

Republicans released a new investigation over the weekend, particularly well-timed for former President Donald Trump’s campaign ahead of Tuesday’s debate, that puts the blame for the way the U.S. departed Afghanistan squarely on President Joe Biden (and now Kamala Harris) .

“The administration’s unconditional surrender and the abandonment of our Afghan allies, who fought alongside the U.S. military against the Taliban — their brothers in arms — is a stain on this administration,” said Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who led the investigation. “I will use every tool in my belt to compel both men to answer for the catastrophic failure of epic proportions their decisions caused.”

On Monday, a group of 10 former top U.S. military commanders shot back with an open letter defending Harris’ foreign policy credentials and accusing Trump of a “chaotic approach” to Afghanistan that “severely hindered” the Biden administration’s withdrawal options when it entered office. Trump originally set a deadline to withdraw all U.S. troops from the country in 2021 as part of a deal with the Taliban that also included the release of 5,000 Taliban fighters from prison. Biden panned the deal, but after he was elected followed through with the full withdrawal plan.

“We believed it was important to write this because we wanted to counter lies” put forward by the Trump campaign and Republican lawmakers on Afghanistan, said Randy Manner, a retired U.S. Army general who signed the letter.

For Republicans, just getting the Afghanistan withdrawal back into the news is a win — as it highlights one of the highest-profile failures in American foreign policy that ended on Biden’s watch, regardless of where the fault for the final phase of the war lies.

When Trump and Harris face off Tuesday, the fact that Afghanistan has been pushed back into the political news cycle makes it more likely it could come up as a topic.

Republicans are increasingly hammering Harris’s role in the policy. “The Afghanistan withdrawal will go down as one of the most embarrassing moments in American history, all thanks to Kamala's incompetence,” Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

The Democrats shoot back that it was Trump before he left office that set the stage for the chaotic withdrawal, and that ultimately, Team Biden made the right call to end an otherwise endless war and focus on bigger threats like Russia and China.

“Americans are no longer fighting and dying in Afghanistan, and we're now no longer spending tens of billions of dollars a month to fight a war that could not be won,” said Rep. Jason Crow , a Colorado Democrat and Army veteran of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The State Department issued a lengthy rebuttal to McCaul’s report on Monday, alleging that over the course of its investigation, the Republican House majority “issued partisan statements, cherry-picked facts, withheld testimonies from the American people, and obfuscated the truth behind conjecture.”

“We will not stand by silently as the department and its workforce are used to further partisan agendas,” the department said.

McCaul has hit the airwaves in network and cable news hits to outline the findings of his three-year investigation, and Trump campaign surrogates are still touting the former president’s ties with Gold Star families of U.S. service members killed in Afghanistan, despite the controversy surrounding his recent visit to Arlington National Cemetery.

Harris’ campaign is lashing out at the Republican presidential contender on national security in a new campaign ad featuring former top Trump officials such as former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper saying he isn’t fit to be commander in chief.

But Harris also has a line to walk between showing that she has been a key player in foreign policy decisions over the past four years, without being hit by criticism over how some of those Biden decisions played out. It’s unclear whether Harris will fight back and hammer Trump on his own Afghanistan strategy in the debate on Tuesday, or try to shift the narrative to other foreign policy issues.

The Harris campaign unveiled a new policy section on her website Monday ahead of the debate including a section on foreign policy, proclaiming that Harris is “ready to be commander in chief on day one.”

The ad cites Harris’s roles on Russia, Ukraine, the Indo-Pacific, Israel and Gaza, and NATO. The website makes no mention of Afghanistan.

A previous version of this article appeared in POLITICO's National Security Daily Newsletter. Like this content? Consider signing up for it .