Some details of how Old Joe Biden’s Potemkin military, distracted by wokeness, catastrophically bungled our withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 are well known: a government watchdog has just confirmed in a new report that Old Joe’s diverse and vaccinated military brass left behind $7.2 in weapons and aircraft for the Taliban, but that was already widely known. Less well known, however, is the information that Marine Sergeant Tyler Vargas-Andrews revealed Wednesday: American snipers could have taken out the jihad bomber who killed 13 Americans at Kabul airport on Aug. 26, 2021, but their superiors ordered them to stand down.
Vargas-Andrews, who was on the scene in Kabul on that fateful day, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that his team of crack snipers had been given precise information about the jihad bomber before he committed his murderous act, including an accurate physical description. Vargas-Andrews recounted, “I asked the intel guys why he wasn’t apprehended sooner, since we had a full description. I was told the asset could not be compromised.” So apparently, if American forces had stopped this jihadi, the person who had provided us with all this detailed info about him would have been able to be identified and killed. That’s plausible, but what happened next is not.
Not long after they received the information about the bomber, Vargas-Andrews and his crew spotted him, but their commanding officer told them not to take any action. Vargas-Andrews recalled that they explained to the commander that it wouldn’t be difficult to take out the bomber: “We reassured him of the ease of fire on the suicide bomber. Pointedly, we asked him for engagement authority and permission. We asked him if we could shoot. Our battalion commander said, and I quote, ‘I don’t know.’” Vargas-Andrews concluded, “Plain and simple, we were ignored. Our expertise was disregarded. No one was held accountable for our safety.”
The commanding officer’s uncertainty may have been related to the rules of engagement by which U.S. troops in Afghanistan had to abide. For many years, these were a cause of considerable vexation to the troops on the ground, as they hamstrung their efforts to strike a serious blow against the Taliban. Back in 2010, a Marine commander in Afghanistan stated, after two Americans were killed by remote-controlled bombs: “It causes a lot of frustration. My men want revenge – that is only natural. But I keep telling them that the rules are the rules for a reason. If we simply go crazy and start shooting at everything, in the long run we will lose this war because we will lose the support of the population.”
That Marine commander added that the Taliban jihadis “know we can’t shoot them if they don’t carry guns or without positive identification. They are fighting us at another level now.” After one Taliban attack, another Marine said, “We were attacked treacherously. We came under fire from everywhere, but the rules of engagement prevent me from doing my job.” Did they prevent Sergeant Vargas-Andrews’ commanding officer from allowing him to take out the jihadi before he killed thirteen Americans? The possibility should not be dismissed out of hand, but Biden’s woke Pentagon is almost certain not to conduct any investigation.
Related: Report on Afghan Withdrawal Details the Spectacular Failings of the Biden Administration
Not long after Vargas-Andrews was not given permission to shoot the bomber, the bomber struck, setting off what Vargas-Andrews described as “a massive wave of pressure. I’m thrown 12 feet onto the ground, but instantly knew what had happened. I opened my eyes to Marines dead or unconscious lying around me.” According to the Washington Free Beacon, Vargas-Andrews “lost multiple organs and two of his limbs. He has had 44 surgeries to date as a result of the attack.”
Even after that, Vargas-Andrews continued, “no one wanted my report post-blast. Even [the Naval Criminal Investigative Service] and the FBI failed to interview me.” He concluded that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was “a catastrophe and there was an inexcusable lack of accountability and negligence.” That’s right. Biden’s military leaders were too busy implementing critical race theory and making sure the troops were vaccinated to bother paying any attention to trivial matters such as how to get American civilians and military personnel safely out of Afghanistan. Their misplaced priorities are still in place and are likely to lead to more disasters in the future, before the woke brass is decisively repudiated.