WASHINGTON — (AP) — Under fire from congressional Republicans about one of the darkest moments of Joe Biden’s presidency, Secretary of State Antony Blinken defended the administration’s handling of the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, saying Democrats struggled to make the best of a bad pullout deal struck by Donald Trump.

Blinken testified Wednesday before the Republican-led House Foreign Affairs Committee, facing questions and angry criticism from lawmakers for the final time in office. The top U.S. diplomat was expected to leave for the Middle East in the afternoon, but the back-and-forth with members, specifically Republicans who admonished the chaotic withdrawal as his defining legacy, delayed his departure.

Blinken said much of the blame for the sudden collapse of Afghanistan's U.S.-allied government and the chaotic August 2021 evacuation of Americans that followed rested with a withdrawal deal President Trump had reached with the Taliban in 2020 before leaving office.

“To the extent President Biden faced a choice, it was between ending the war or escalating it,” Blinken told lawmakers. “Had he not followed through on his predecessor’s commitment, attacks on our forces and allies would have resumed and the Taliban’s assault on the country’s major cities would have commenced.”

But McCaul and other Republican lawmakers portrayed Blinken and the Biden administration as ill-prepared and disengaged as the disaster grew, and intent on minimizing mounting evidence that the Taliban would complete a takeover of the country before the last U.S. troops departed.

“This catastrophic event was the beginning of a failed foreign policy that lit the world on fire,” McCaul, a Texas Republican, said. He urged Blinken to take “accountability for the disastrous withdrawal.”

It was clear “it was going to be a disaster,” said Florida Republican Rep. Brian Mast, who will take over as chairman of the committee in the next Congress.

The hearing came at the end of Blinken's diplomatic service under Biden, with six weeks left before Trump takes office, and at the end of McCaul's time leading the Foreign Affairs committee. It served as a capstone to nearly four years of animosity between the two over the end of America's longest war.

“For my part, I’ve been determined to learn the lessons from this experience, not only to learn them, but to act on them,” Blinken said.

He added, “We’ve made the State Department stronger and better able to respond to crises than it was when we found it, or it was during the Afghan evacuation.”

There was little new ground broken on the U.S. withdrawal, after years of blame-trading between Republicans and Democrats. Blinken pointed Wednesday to the planned 2026 release of a government-appointed Afghanistan war commission's review as the best prospect of an independent full report on the disastrous events of the summer of 2021.

The 20-year U.S. military occupation of Afghanistan succeeded in routing the al-Qaida militants responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, whom Afghanistan's fundamentalist Taliban militants had allowed a home. But as the U.S. began its pullout, as set by Trump's deal and carried out by Biden, Taliban fighters routed the U.S.-allied government and military, capturing control of the country within months.

An extremist group's bombing at the Kabul airport killed 13 U.S. service members and nearly 200 Afghans as Americans, Afghan allies and others thronged the airport in hopes of seats on the last U.S. military-run flights out.

Blinken testified Wednesday that all of the “hundreds” of Americans and dual citizens stranded by the sudden scramble from Afghanistan have now been able to leave, if they have chosen.

He opened his appearance before the committee by turning to families of U.S. forces killed in the withdrawal and expressing condolences. Protesters repeatedly interrupted his comments, crying out “scum” and “genocide,” before security cleared the room of them.

Blinken denied Republican charges that he and others ignored warnings from lower-ranking administration officials that the U.S. withdrawal would go badly wrong, and that the U.S. had to move faster on getting out Americans and the Afghans who had worked for and allied with them.

“We anticipated that Kabul would remain in the hands of the Afghan government” through the end of the year, Blinken said. “This unfolded more quickly than we anticipated including in the intelligence community.”

“Waiting until the last minute is not executing a plan,” McCaul said.

Blinken's testimony came months after House Republicans issued a scathing report on their investigation into the withdrawal, blaming the disastrous end on Biden's administration. They played down Trump's role in the failures even though he had signed the withdrawal deal with the Taliban.

Previous investigations and analyses by a government-appointed special investigator for Afghanistan and some private policy groups have pointed to a systemic failure spanning the last four presidential administrations and concluded that Biden and Trump share the heaviest blame.

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