According to a report released Thursday by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, there were as many as 9,000 Americans left in Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal. This comes after public statements from Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who claimed that only 100-150 Americans remained in Afghanistan and had contacted the U.S. government with a desire to leave.
“Ancient history,” Biden, the media, and the Democrats will say. The problem is that the “history” that they wanted voters to remember was not the truth and that they deliberately lied to conceal their massive incompetence.
The report, signed by Foreign Relations ranking member Jim Risch of Idaho, reveals that State Department officials believed that between 10,000 and 15,000 Americans were in Afghanistan as late as Aug. 17. In the next two weeks, only 6,000 Americans were able to escape the country ahead of the Taliban takeover. In testimony in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, however, Blinken claimed that “approximately 100-150 remained in Afghanistan who still wished to depart.”
Estimating the number of Americans residing or visiting a country like Afghanistan is “50% art and 50% science and educated guesswork,” staffers of the former Kabul Embassy reportedly said, since Americans are encouraged but not required to register with the State Department when they enter a country. The staffers noted that host countries are generally able to provide better estimates than the embassy, but that Afghanistan was not capable of doing so.
No doubt the situation was chaotic and the Afghan government was of little or no help. And after the troops withdrew, the Taliban had no incentive whatsoever to help the U.S. get Americans out of the country.
But the brazen lying by Biden administration officials has to be exposed for what it was; a cheap, political gambit to keep responsibility for the debacle in Afghanistan from tainting the presidency of Joe Biden.
After Kabul fell to the Taliban, the Biden administration was still slow to organize contingency responses for withdrawal. The Transportation Department waited five days to issue an order allowing foreign airlines to deliver evacuees to American airports, and seven days to activate the Civil Reserve Aircraft Fleet (CRAF). The CRAF is a private airline fleet that can aid the U.S. military in a crisis, but “was barely used and did little to impact evacuation operations.”
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The Biden administration tried declaring the operation a “success” and considering it a closed matter. But few Americans accepted that and so here we are, almost five months out from the withdrawal and there are still Americans in Afghanistan who want to come home. They are hostages of the Taliban as surely as the Americans held by Iran in 1980 for 444 days.