House Intel Committee to receive briefing on Afghanistan

Members of the House Intelligence Committee will meet with intelligence community officials on Monday to discuss the fallout in Afghanistan.

“Briefers from several IC agencies will discuss the analytic assessment of Afghanistan and how it evolved in advance of Kabul’s fall, the current situation on the ground, and how it may develop in the coming days,” a committee official said by email.

The briefing, which is believed to be the first in-person meeting with lawmakers, comes as four separate congressional committees have pledged to conduct oversight efforts into the administration’s moves in withdrawing from Afghanistan.

It also comes as administration officials have been increasingly critical of U.S. intelligence.

​​“There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days,” Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday.  

The official said the House committee will conduct additional oversight events after the August recess “including on collection posture, analyses, IC operations, and counterterrorism.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee is similarly planning to review the administration’s decisions in Afghanistan, with Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) noting that the intelligence community had been clear that the Taliban would make gains without a U.S. presence.

“I hope to work with the other committees of jurisdiction to ask tough but necessary questions about why we weren’t better prepared for a worst-case scenario involving such a swift and total collapse of the Afghan government and security forces,” he said in a statement earlier this week.

Some former intelligence officials have defended the community’s work as it comes under the microscope.

“The real question here isn’t why did intelligence get it wrong, it’s really, what were the assumptions that policymakers were making when they made the decisions that they made?” Katrina Mulligan, who has held national security roles at the National Security Council and the Department of Justice, previously told The Hill.