‘Culmination of series of mistakes’

Members of the US Congress, including many of President Joe Biden's fellow Democrats, said on Tuesday they were increasingly frustrated with events in Afghanistan, vowing to investigate what went wrong. 

"The events of recent days have been the culmination of a series of mistakes made by Republican and Democratic administrations over the past 20 years," Senator Bob Menendez, Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement.

"We are now witnessing the horrifying result of many years of policy and intelligence failures," Menendez said.

Menendez said his committee would hold a hearing on US policy toward Afghanistan, including negotiations between former Republican President Donald Trump's administration and the Taliban and the Biden's administration's execution of the withdrawal.

Committee Republicans said they wanted Secretary of State Antony Blinken to testify, "to understand why the State Department was so ill prepared for the contingencies unfolding before us," according to a letter sent to Menendez.

"Updates from the State Department have been inconsistent, lacked important detail, and not be responsive to Members and the American people," the Republicans wrote.

The date of the hearing was not immediately announced.

Meanwhile, Biden's approval rating dropped by 7 percentage points and hit its lowest level so far, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.

The national opinion poll, conducted on Monday, found that 46% of American adults approved of Biden's performance in office, the lowest recorded in weekly polls that started when Biden took office in January.

It is also down from the 53% who felt the same way in a similar Reuters/Ipsos poll that ran on Friday.

Biden's popularity dropped as the Taliban entered the capital, Kabul, wiping away two decades of US military presence that cost nearly 1 trillion taxpayer dollars and thousands of American lives.

However, a majority of both Republican and Democratic voters said the chaos was a sign that the United States should leave.

A separate Ipsos snap poll, also conducted on Monday, found that fewer than half of Americans liked the way Biden has steered the U.S. military and diplomatic effort in Afghanistan this year. The president, who just last month praised Afghan forces for being "as well-equipped as any in the world," was rated worse than the other three presidents who presided over the United States' longest war.