Mills Attacks Austin: Will Anyone Be Held Accountable for Afghanistan?
It’s been two years since a suicide bomber detonated 20 pounds of explosives at the Abbey Gate at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul during the single-most-disorganized embarrassment of a withdrawal that the U.S. has conducted. Thirteen U.S. service members and an estimated 170 Afghan civilians lost their lives — and just one congressman is ready to stop holding hearings and to start holding Biden officials accountable.
On Friday, Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) filed a single article of impeachment against U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, accusing him of high crimes and misdemeanors for the U.S.’s bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan. (READ MORE: Biden’s Afghanistan Disinformation)
The question is: Will Mills’ attempt be at all effective at holding officials accountable for their incompetence?
Mills Blames Austin for Death Toll
The article of impeachment accuses Austin of “dereliction of duty” and of abandoning Americans in Afghanistan, arguing that the secretary of defense has “‘forsaken his sworn duties to the United States of America, its national security, and its people and has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with the Constitution’ warranting ‘impeachment and trial and removal from office.’”
In a statement on Friday, Mills claimed that “[h]igh-level officials in this administration blatantly ignored intel that Americans and our allied partners in Kabul would be left behind in harm’s way unless the U.S. corrected course in our withdrawal”; “[a]s a result, nearly 200 people … were murdered at Abbey Gate in Kabul, Afghanistan two years ago.” (READ MORE: Afghanistan: How It Became America’s Disaster)
Mills, who served in the U.S. Army during the Iraq War, decried Congress’ failure to hold anyone accountable. “The fact that it has been two entire years without any member of this administration being held accountable is unfathomable,” he said. “That changes today.”
The Aug. 26, 2021, attack was the subject of an investigation conducted by the military, which claimed that the suicide bomber acted alone. Army Brig. Gen. Lance Curtis, a member of the investigation team, told reporters in 2022 that the attack was “not preventable.”
In a statement released earlier this month, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) alleged that the whole bungled operation was conducted for political reasons:
The Biden administration decided they wanted all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of 9/11. This was a purely political decision that ignored both the situation on the ground and advances in intra-Afghan peace talks. As predicted, when the U.S. hastily evacuated our troops from the country, chaos ensued and the Taliban captured Kabul in just 10 days.
During a hearing in March 2023, Austin told Congress members that he had “no regrets” about the way the Afghanistan withdrawal was conducted. Mills told Austin during that hearing that he had drafted articles of impeachment. On Friday, Mills said, “It’s not enough for Congress to hold committee hearings” and urged lawmakers to take “real action” and hold Biden officials accountable. (READ MORE: Biden’s Afghanistan Failure Continues)
The million-dollar question is whether Mills’ impeachment will garner any real support or produce any tangible response. Republicans have threatened to impeach several members of the Biden administration and have even filed articles of impeachment against President Joe Biden, but none of those measures seem likely to go anywhere.
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