Dear Friends, Like many of you, I’m heartbroken by the tragic, yet predictable, scenes playing out in Afghanistan. I want to take a moment to share my thoughts on how we got to this point in history, where we go from here, and what must be done to protect Americans and our most vulnerable Afghan allies. What we are seeing today is the inevitable result of a tragically flawed 20-year mission by the United States and failed policy on both sides of the aisle that I have long opposed. Two decades ago, it was reasonable to hold accountable Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda henchmen in Afghanistan. At that point, the United States had the world united behind our efforts for justice. But the reasonable response quickly went off the rails. First was the tragic mistake of the war in Iraq. Next was the flawed fantasy that we could bend the wind and set up a stable government on behalf of the Afghan people. The result has been 20 years of chaos, bloodshed, and wasted time and resources. Two generations of brave young American military, as well as civilians, have struggled valiantly with a mission doomed to fail. More troops for an indefinite amount of time were never the answer. It’s clear that many political leaders across multiple decades are at fault. Efforts to pin this as a sole failure of President Joe Biden are cynical attempts to rewrite history. Already this week, the Republican National Committee deleted their webpage praising Donald Trump’s decision last year to cut a deal with the Taliban that set a May 2021 deadline for withdrawal. Beyond Trump’s disastrous policies, which he continued to claim credit for up until a few weeks ago, the record is undeniable that this started back with George W. Bush. Of course, it was not helped by Barack Obama’s troop surge, which I opposed. But historians will agree that Donald Trump was the fuse that empowered a stealth campaign by the Taliban to slowly take over this horribly damaged country and their flawed political leaders. When Donald Trump made the Doha agreement, there were 13,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. By the time President Biden took office, Trump had drawn down troops to 2,500. Our commander-in-chief is right not to send U.S. men and women back to Afghanistan for an indefinite war. Despite Trump’s actions to strengthen the Taliban, there’s no excuse that our intelligence didn’t fully comprehend the weakness of the Afghan government and its security forces. We are going to need serious investigations into how our intelligence failed, and what we can do to ensure it doesn’t happen again.  It’s probably only a matter of time before the training, weaponry, and the internal divisions in Afghanistan fuel other brutal warlords, who will rule along with the Taliban adding to the complexity, essentially bringing us back where we started minus Osama bin Laden. Despite this, it is important that Republican efforts to rewrite history to absolve Donald Trump’s responsibility for the chaos not include an effort to draw us back in to this conflict. While the execution of this withdrawal was inadequate, at the end of the day, President Biden was right: the United States should not enter a third decade of conflict and troop surges to fight in a civil war that Afghanistan wouldn't fight for themselves. The outcome would not be different if we waited two more weeks, two more months, two more years, or even two more decades. And the addition of more American boots on the ground and lives lost would not alter this tragic trajectory. In the face of this crisis, I have been one of the Congressional leaders calling for a massive effort to rescue Afghans who helped the United States for two decades and whose lives are at risk because they were our friends. I am proud of bipartisan legislation that I authored with Senators Ted Kennedy and John McCain over a decade ago to provide an escape route for Afghan allies and their families in the Special Immigrant Visa program.  While our legislation created this program, we now must use every reasonable effort to secure safe passage out of Afghanistan for as many as possible. For months, I’ve worked in Congress to ramp up efforts and accelerate the vetting to get them out of harm’s way, hoping to avoid the last-minute chaos we see today. There is still time to save lives, but the administration must act immediately.   Already, the Biden administration has deployed 6,000 U.S. military to Afghanistan to secure the airport and ensure that flights can safely depart.More action is needed, and I will be continuing to work with the administration to protect Americans and our Afghan allies.