US House clashes over Harris’s role in 2021 Afghanistan troop withdrawal

Partisan divisions over the chaotic 2021 pullout of western forces from Afghanistan have burst into the open ahead of Tuesday’s presidential debate in Philadelphia after a Republican-led congressional report attempted to implicate Kamala Harris in the episode.

A 250-page report from the House of Representatives ’ foreign affairs committee castigated the Biden administration for failing to anticipate the Taliban’s rapid takeover and neglecting to prepare for the orderly departure of non-combatant personnel.

The decision led to a shambolic evacuation effort and numerous American civilians and US-allied Afghans being left stranded as the country fell to hardline Islamist forces that America and its Nato allies had spent 20 years trying to defeat.

The report, written by the committee’s Republican chairman, Michael McCaul, zeroes in on the supposed role played by the US vice-president – mentioning her name 251 times, although no evidence has emerged that she was directly involved in the decisions leading to one of the most damaging foreign policy chapters of Joe Biden ’s presidency.

By contrast, a 115-page interim report issued by McCaul on the committee’s investigation on 2022 name-checked Harris just twice.

Democrats seized on the contrast, accusing McCaul of inflating Harris’s part in the incident simply because she had replaced Biden as the party’s presidential nominee.

“Vice President Kamala Harris was the last person in the room when President Biden made the decision to withdraw all US forces from Afghanistan; a fact she boasted about shortly after President Biden issued his go-to-zero order,” states the latest report , titled Wilful Blindness: An assessment of the Biden-Harris administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and the chaos that followed.

The report’s front page carries a picture of Harris prominently displayed below that of Biden, and above an image of Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, who played a more prominent role in the withdrawal.

“Despite warnings against withdrawing by senior leaders, Vice President Harris’ aide disclosed the vice president ‘strongly supported’ President Biden’s decision,” McCaul’s report goes on. “President Biden’s former Chief of Staff Ron Klain affirmed Vice President Harris was entrenched in the president’s Afghanistan policy.”

Related: Biden ‘privately defiant’ over chaotic 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, book says

Democrats accused the Republicans of trying to exploit the withdrawal for election purposes while overlooking the fact that the party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump , took the original decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan when he was president.

“Republicans now claim [Harris] was the architect of the US withdrawal though she is referenced only three times in 3,288 pages of the Committee’s interview transcripts,” wrote Gregory Meeks, the Democrats’ ranking member on the committee in a 59-page rebuttal to McCaul’s report.

Harris’s alleged role in the withdrawal seems likely to arise when she meets Trump for their only scheduled televised debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

Sharon Yan, a spokesperson for the White House national security council, said the the report was “based on cherry-picked facts, inaccurate characterizations and pre-existing biases”.

She added: “Ending our longest war was the right thing to do and our nation is stronger today as a result.”

Harris’s campaign has tried to promote her role in Biden’s foreign policy decisions since she replaced at the top of the Democratic ticket. But she has said little about the Afghan withdrawal. The House report notes that she was on a trip to Singapore and Vietnam at the time and publicly pledged that the administration would protect Afghan women and children.

It concludes: “Her promise has clearly not been fulfilled.”

Related: Democrats seize on Trump cemetery photo op ‘disgrace’ as election issue

Democrats’ accusation of using the Afghan pull-out for campaign purposes echoes criticisms of Trump’s now notorious visit to Arlington national cemetery last month to mark the third anniversary of the event.

The former US president’s campaign was rebuked by the US army after its staffers reportedly became embroiled in a confrontation with a cemetery worker when she tried to enforce rules against filming and photographing in a section reserved for service members killed in the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts.

Pictures and footage subsequently emerged of Trump posing at the graveside of personnel killed in a suicide bombing at Abbey Gate, near Kabul airport – which resulted in the deaths of 13 US personnel and roughly 170 Afghans. Trump denied that his visit was a campaign event, pointing out that he had been invited by families of the fallen servicemen .