A former US Marine who was badly wounded in Afghanistan testified before Congress that a 2021 withdrawal would be “catastrophic”.
Tyler Vargas Andrews spoke in the first of a series of Republican-led hearings examining the Biden administration’s handling of the pullout.
He described the period of chaos and unpreparedness in the days following the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul.
Others spoke of lasting trauma and moral injury as a result.
Sergeant Vargas Andrews, 25, was one of several U.S. military personnel guarding Kabul’s airport on Aug. 26, 2021, when two suicide bombers attacked a crowd of Afghans trying to flee the Taliban during the U.S. withdrawal. .
Thirteen US soldiers were killed in the bombing along with 170 Afghan civilians.
Sergeant Vargas Andrews testified that he and another U.S. Marine received intelligence before the bombing occurred, and that he saw the suspect in the crowd.
He said he had informed his supervisors and requested permission to take action but had never received it.
“Plain and simple, we were ignored,” Sergeant Vargas Andrews said.
In emotional testimony, he described being thrown into the air during the bombing and opening his eyes to see his comrades dead or unconscious around him.
“My body was crushed by the shock of the blast. My stomach was exposed. Every inch of my exposed body was taken with ball bearings and shrapnel,” he said.
Sergeant Vargas Andrews called the evacuation a “catastrophe”, adding: “There was an inexcusable lack of accountability and negligence.”
“I see the faces of all the people we couldn’t save, the people we left behind,” he said.
A House Foreign Affairs Committee inquiry into the withdrawal from Afghanistan also heard from other U.S. soldiers and veterans who spoke about the mental health toll the withdrawal took on them.
Retired Lt. Col. David Scott Mann, who worked to evacuate the Afghans at the time, testified that the experience trying to evacuate allies was “encouraging.”
He added that calls to the Veteran Affairs hotline increased by 81 percent after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and warned that America is on the “front end of a mental health tsunami.”
He said a friend he served with had died by suicide as a result.
“He could not find a way out of the darkness of this moral injury,” Lt. Col. Mann said.
The testimony of the majority of witnesses indicted every presidential administration since US troops were first deployed to Afghanistan, from George W. Bush to Joe Biden.
Eyewitnesses also called for immediate action to help Afghan allies who are now missing in both Afghanistan and the United States.
“The U.S. is building a dirty reputation for systematically abandoning its allies over generations where we’re leaving behind human garbage, from the Montagnards of Vietnam to the Kurds of Syria,” Lt. Col. Mann said.
Republicans who had long pushed for an investigation blamed the Biden administration.
The panel’s chairman, Mike McCaul, a House Republican from Texas, said the withdrawal was “a systematic breakdown of the federal government at every level, and a spectacular failure of leadership by the Biden administration.”
In response, Democrats spoke out in defense of President Biden.
Congressman Gregory Max from New York said Mr Biden had “made the right decision to bring all our troops home”.
“I cannot in good conscience imagine sending more American men and women to fight in Afghanistan.”
Mr Biden has previously said he is “basically responsible for everything that has happened”, but also blamed former President Donald Trump for overseeing the withdrawal agreement with the Taliban.
