While the Biden administration’s chaotic and inept withdrawal from Afghanistan was unfolding in August 2021, a suicide bomber murdered 13 American service members, and at least 170 Afghans, at the Abbey Gate outside Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. It was the most brutal attack on our troops in 20 years of service in Afghanistan.
“Know this,” President Joe Biden said after the bombing. “We will not forgive. We won’t forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.” This turned out to be face-saving political theater. Three days later, a drone strike killed ten Afghans, seven children. Not one of the dead, as far as we know, was an “ISIS facilitator,” as the administration had alleged.
In fact, the Pentagon now says that the bombing was the work of a lone terrorist rather than a “complex” network, as the Biden administration had initially maintained. At the time, Gen. Mark Milley not only referred to the strike as “valid” and “righteous” but went further to describe a “secondary explosion” and a supposed plethora of evidence justifying the bombing. It seems that none of this was true.
We also learn through ProPublica’s recent investigation into the Kabul suicide bombing that, despite intelligence warning of terrorist attacks, U.S. military commanders encouraged use of the routes. Some U.S. officials even provided maps that allowed evacuees to bypass Taliban fighters at a checkpoint outside of the airport.
The fact that the murderer of 13 Americans “likely” gained access to troops via a path that U.S. officials were encouraging people to use seems quite noteworthy. We also helped evacuees to circumvent the Taliban, while the Biden administration assured the American public that Islamic militants were facilitating their extraction.
These are the same Taliban with whom the Biden administration had reportedly shared a list of “American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies.” It is the same Taliban that the administration declared had comported themselves in a “businesslike and professional” manner.
You will recall as well White House press secretary Jen Psaki contending that no Americans had been “stranded” in Afghanistan. Secretary of State Antony Blinken would later say that there were “under 200” Americans remaining in Afghanistan who “want to leave.”
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s new report, which was written by Jim Risch (R. Idaho), claims that officials from the State Department estimated that 10,000-15,000 Americans were still trapped in Afghanistan in August. Six thousand Americans were able escape during the two weeks that the Afghan forces fell apart. I’m not a math whiz, but that leaves a lot more than zero, or even 200, stranded. How many of those American citizens, green-card holders, and Afghan allies were given their names to the Taliban by the Taliban? Did Islamists kill or hunt down the interpreters on this list?
The Pentagon investigation into the bombing, relying on hundreds of witness interviews and drone footage and reports by medical examiners, concludes that the suicide bombing at Abbey Gate was “not preventable.” In truth, the attack became unpreventable only after the Biden administration evacuated secure positions without having extracted those who wanted to leave.
The Department of Defense was recently provided with a declassified report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. This report was submitted in January 2021. It warned the administration that the Afghan Air Force would collapse quickly. Military personnel would have been “much better prepared to conduct a more orderly” evacuation, said Navy Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, the top U.S. commander on the ground, “if policymakers had paid attention to the indicators of what was happening on the ground.”
But none of this advice prevented the president from abandoning Bagram Airfield. It didn’t prompt him to establish military safe zones to assist Afghan and American allies who were stranded before he fled. His inability to do so led to a Kabul airport bottleneck that placed civilians and troops at unnecessary risk.
Biden was wedded to the Taliban’s timeline. Given that he’s shown reliably disastrous foreign-policy instincts over 50 years in public life, this isn’t exactly surprising. It’s also increasingly clear that the administration ignored warnings because it believed leaving Afghanistan, which was quite popular in polls, would be a political slam dunk early in his term.
That was Biden’s prerogative. The president does not have to follow the advice of his Generals. Many of them would, undoubtedly, advocate for a U.S. military presence in Afghanistan for all time. As a policy matter, Biden’s botching of the evacuation is a separate issue from whether the United States should have withdrawn. Biden accepted the Trump administration’s responsibility to protect American lives, but he did so after he had made that decision. There are many questions that remain to be answered about why he failed.
COPYRIGHT 2022. CREATORS.COM
The Daily Signal is open to all perspectives. Nothing here should be taken to mean that The Heritage Foundation views are represented.
Do you have a comment about this article? Please email to share your thoughts. [email protected] and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Make sure to include the URL of the article or the headline, as well as your name and hometown.
