Two years after 'embarrassing' Afghanistan withdrawal, GOP rep pins failures on one big Biden admin decision

Rep. Mike Garcia, R-Calif., blasted the Biden admin. for failing to lead a "military operation" during the botched 2021 withdrawal that left 13 U.S. service members dead.

"The fact that we communicated the withdrawal in advance, and gave them a prescribed date with an unconditional withdrawal commitment, the fact that we abandoned Bagram in the middle of the night, leaving our Afghan partners completely off kilter and unaware that we were doing that, releasing hundreds, if not thousands of prisoners," Garcia said. "The fact that we pulled the troops out before we pulled American civilians out, and the fact that we left hundreds, if not thousands of Americans behind, were very self-evident at the time, but this more subtle lesson learned, that we were so hell-bent to make sure that this was a diplomatic mission that we didn't put the resources on the ground necessary to truly protect our troops." Christopher Lopez is a digital production assistant for Fox News Digital. He joined Fox News in 2021.

Garcia criticized the Biden administration's decision to maintain operation control under the State Department instead of transitioning to the Department of Defense (D.O.D.), which he argued would have better protected American and Afghan lives.

"We failed to pivot into a D.O.D. mindset with a D.O.D. Operational Control Authority under the Secretary of Defense. This is the fault not only of the president, but also Secretary of State Blinken, and most importantly, in my opinion, Secretary of Defense Austin, who didn't have the courage to assert himself," he said. "This weekend, as you know, we honor the 13 service members who died as a result of this very important strategic failure and there were a lot of tactical failures beneath that, but they all stemmed from the fact that this was not a military operation, this was a State Department diplomatic mission from day one, and it never transitioned."