A retired Army colonel said Thursday that the lack of a leader directing the military and State Department actions on the ground during the Afghanistan withdrawal created confusion and contributed to the perceived failures that marked the war’s end in 2021.

Republican Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, at a Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing on the Afghanistan withdrawal, said the Biden administration had yet answer his request for evidence of an evacuation plan, suggesting that perhaps none existed in the first place. The Biden administration said it accounted for all possible contingencies, but the high-ranking colonels who commanded in Afghanistan testified to Congress that the administration chose an inferior course of action that failed to account for the Taliban’s catapult toward Kabul.

“There’s nobody functionally in charge of our wars on the ground” Retired Col. Christopher Kolenda, a combat leader in Afghanistan who participated in the Doha negotiations with the Taliban, told the panel.