According to the Biden administration, no more than a couple hundred American citizens remain in Afghanistan. President Biden said in his speech on Tuesday that most are dual citizens with family ties to the country and many don’t want to leave.
But, according to a U.S. official who spoke with the Daily Caller last week, there are likely a lot more still in the country. He said at the time there were an estimated 8,000 Americans in the country and it was doubtful we’d get to bring them all home. According to one estimate, roughly 350 Americans were being evacuated daily alongside thousands of Afghans—meaning that if the U.S. official’s estimate that there were 8,000 Americans still in the country last week was correct, there’d be over 5,000 Americans left behind by the Biden administration—not a couple hundred.
What are we supposed to believe? Part of the problem is that we can’t really trust the numbers released publicly by the Biden administration—they’re vague and don’t differentiate between Afghan refugees and American citizens.
According to Joe Biden on Monday, “The past 17 days have seen our troops execute the largest airlift in US history, evacuating over 120,000 US citizens, citizens of our allies, and Afghan allies of the United States,” though he did not clarify how many were U.S. citizens. Trust me, that’s by design. According to the official who spoke with the Daily Caller, “it’s become a quiet rule among officials to avoid giving out a more precise number of U.S. citizens evacuated, in part because it’s ’embarrassingly low.’”
Joe Biden victoriously claimed the war in Afghanistan is over and is certainly hoping that Americans will focus on something else while the remaining Americans who want to leave are evacuated. We might never know exactly how many Americans are still left in Afghanistan, but I have no doubt it’s more than 200. And until the Biden administration starts being more transparent on these numbers, we have no reason to believe otherwise.
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