One year ago, three days after the Taliban swept into Kabul, Joe Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that intelligence did not indicate that a Taliban takeover was likely — even though the Afghan government had already dissolved. This was just one lie of many told by Joe Biden about the “Big Skedaddle” from Afghanistan by U.S. forces.
Biden also said during that interview that American forces would stay until all Americans and Afghan allies were evacuated. This was another lie that is yet ongoing. Now an investigation by House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Republican staff “has found that 800 Americans were helped out of Afghanistan, indicating that the Biden administration either undercounted the number of Americans who wanted to depart the country or saw an uptick in the number of citizens willing to leave,” according to Politico.
Why did it never occur to Politico that it wasn’t an “undercount” or an “uptick in citizens willing to leave.” This was a lie. Biden knew that there were still hundreds — probably thousands — of Americans stuck in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, yet his administration blithely assured the American people otherwise. Secretary of State Antony Blinken “told lawmakers” on August 31 “that there were only 100 American citizens left in Afghanistan who wanted to leave.” By February, we had evacuated 479 Americans after Biden claimed that all Americans who wanted to leave were able to get out.
A committee aide suggested it’s possible the number of Americans citizens whisked out of Afghanistan may yet be higher. “Whether they had travel documents or whether they could get to Kabul, that was part of that factor,” the staffer said, referring to those left behind after the frenzied evacuation last August.
The true number could be closer to 1,000, the aide said, to include those who left Afghanistan via privately funded organizations — many of which were aided by outreach attempts from advisers to Vice President Kamala Harris and First Lady Jill Biden, the investigation found. Those separate efforts were necessary in part because only 36 U.S. consular officers were on the ground in Kabul to help process the evacuees, the report concludes.
For obvious reasons, we’re not told how many American citizens or legal residents are stuck in Afghanistan today. We know that there are thousands of Afghan interpreters who failed to escape and who may or may not have suffered a gruesome fate.
But the fate of any Americans left behind is still unknown. What’s becoming clearer as time goes on is that Joe Biden’s lies about our withdrawal from Afghanistan are ongoing and it won’t be until Republicans with subpoena power force the president’s men and women to come clean about the withdrawal and how this disaster unfolded in the corridors of power.
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