The US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee said on Thursday it will subpoena President Donald Trump's special Afghanistan envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, to testify on Sept. 19, after the abrupt cancellation of talks with the country's Taliban militia. Representative Eliot Engel, the committee's Democratic chairman, said he signed the subpoena after the U.S. State Department ignored numerous requests for briefings by Khalilzad about the Afghanistan peace plan and the administration's path forward in the country.
Engel released a letter last week expressing frustration with the administration's failure to arrange briefings by Khalilzad. He said the State Department had refused requests in February, April and earlier this month for briefings or testimony. "More than 2,000 American troops have died in Afghanistan, and I'm fed up with this Administration keeping Congress and the American people in the dark on the peace process and how we're going to bring this long war to a close," Engel said in a statement.
"For months, we haven't been able to get answers on the Afghanistan peace plan, and now the President is saying the plan is dead. We need to hear directly from the Administration's point person on Afghanistan to understand how this process went off the rails. I expect to see Ambassador Khalilzad in our hearing room next Thursday at 10 o'clock sharp," Engel said.
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the subpoena. Trump proclaimed negotiations with Afghanistan's Taliban leaders dead on Monday after scrapping talks with the group planned for Camp David, Maryland, during the weekend after a U.S. soldier was killed by a suicide bomber in Kabul.
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