Earlier this week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released a report that as many as 9,000 Americans were left in Afghanistan after Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal.
The botched withdrawal from Afghanistan became the biggest public relations disaster for the Biden administration. It sent his poll numbers into negative territory for the first time in his presidency, and they’ve never recovered.
But as shocking as it is to hear that Joe Biden left behind as many as 9,000 Americans in the now Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, it’s been clear from the very beginning that the Biden administration was lying about how many Americans they abandoned. Initially, the Biden administration claimed there were 100-200 American citizens left behind in Afghanistan.
“Now we believe that about 100 to 200 Americans remain in Afghanistan with some intention to leave,” Biden said on Aug. 31. “Most of those who remain are dual citizens, long-time residents who had earlier decided to stay because of their family roots in Afghanistan.”
Biden also assured us that his administration was working aggressively to get them all out. “And for those remaining Americans, there is no deadline. We remain committed to get them out if they want to come out. Secretary of State Blinken is leading the continued diplomatic efforts to ensure a safe passage for any American, Afghan partner, or foreign national who wants to leave Afghanistan.”
Days later, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain also claimed that there were only about a hundred American citizens left in the country and said, “We’re in touch with all of them who we’ve identified on a regular basis.”
But as the weeks passed, the number of American citizens the Biden administration acknowledged were left still in the country kept going up, not down. It was apparent at the time of the chaotic evacuations at Kabul airport that significant numbers of Americans would be left behind. According to a leaked State Department cable from the last week of August Americans represented less than 17% of the people who were being evacuated. The Biden administration not only did not prioritize Americans in their evacuation, but Americans were the minority of those they evacuated.
And as time passed, the situation kept looking worse, not better. In November, the Pentagon admitted that immediate family members of U.S. service members are among those Americans left behind in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. And the Biden administration was of little help. According to reports, it took veterans’ groups and members of Congress to help evacuate the families of 48 service members in the Army and Marine Corps who had 509 relatives stuck in Afghanistan in October. That number alone was higher than the numbers claimed by Biden and his administration.
The Biden administration will claim that the discrepancy is due to them not having identified all those who were still in Afghanistan, but we’ve known that there were potentially thousands of Americans left in Afghanistan since August. A U.S. official told the Daily Caller that there would be an estimated 8,000 Americans left in Afghanistan by the Aug. 31 withdrawal deadline.
So it is undeniable that the Biden administration knew that there were several thousand Americans left in Afghanistan and deliberately lied to the American public to minimize the public relations disaster.
