Monday morning at the Defense Department briefing on the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, Army Maj. Gen. Hank Taylor found something to boast about amid the catastrophe of the Biden administration and its woke military: Taylor touted the military’s efficiency in getting Afghans out of the Taliban’s clutches and into the United States. At least 2,500 Afghans are already here, and many more are coming.
“As of this morning,” Taylor said proudly, “within the last 24 hours, 25 U.S. military C-17s, three U.S. military C-130s, and then a combination of 61 charter, commercial, and other military flights departed Kabul. The total passenger count, uh, for those flights, was approximately 16,000. Uh, of that number, the U.S. military transported just under 11,000 personnel.” These people were flown to various American bases around the world, which Taylor oddly presented as a sign of the marvelous cooperation that the U.S. gets from our allies: “Our mission remains focused on ensuring a steady flow of evacuees out of Kabul to the intermediate staging bases and safe havens, and our installations, uh, continue to rapidly build out capacity as needed to ensure reception and providing humanitarian, uh, assistance. The use of temporary safe haven locations across Europe and the Middle East, uh, to — in areas that include U.S. installations in Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Italy, Spain, and Germany. We deeply appreciate the support, uh, from those countries. This is truly a testament, uh, to the importance of our alliances and our partnerships.”
Those “safe havens” are evidently only temporary, with the United States being the ultimate destination. Many Afghans are already here. Taylor continued: “In the past 24 hours, uh, five flights landed at Dulles International Airport, with approximately 1,300 passengers. At this time, four military installations, as well as Dulles International, are receiving Afghans as they, uh, come into the United States. These installations include Fort McCoy, Wisconsin; Fort Lee, Virginia; Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey; and Fort Bliss, Texas. The total number currently at these installations is approximately 1,200, and NORTHCOM continues to build out capacity, uh, to ensure they are prepared to receive more flights that will come in the next few days.” That’s 2,500 Afghans already here, and many more on the way.
Asked by a reporter named Bob about the military’s current airlift capacity, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby took the opportunity to assure the American public that these Afghans are being carefully vetted: “We had set a goal of 5 to 9,000 a day. Yesterday we exceeded that. We’re not taking anything for granted, Bob, uh, we’re taking this day by day. We’d love to see those numbers continue to rise, uh, but we’re gonna just take it day by day. There’s a lot of factors that go into being able to reach that output capacity, to include, uh, temporary safe havens that you can bring these individuals to as they complete their screening, uh, and the screening is a big part of that. We have, uh, intelligence and law enforcement personnel, uh, at these sites, making sure that robust screening is done of these individuals, so that nobody comes into the United States that hasn’t been, uh, screened in a robust manner.”
However, Taylor was asked: “You mentioned that 42,000 have been evacuated since July….Do you have any breakdown of the number of U.S. citizens in that 42,000 who have gotten out?” Perhaps aware of how much of a hot button issue this is, he refused to reply, answering only: “I do, but I don’t have that right now.”
So thousands of Afghans are flooding into the United States, and John Kirby tells us all is well, they’ve been “screened in a robust manner.” But this is the U.S. military, a once-proud institution whose CENTCOM commander claimed in June: “We have workable plans to evacuate any scale of people that we would be directed to do.” Obviously, no such plans really existed, or they were never implemented. This is also an American administration, and a U.S. military, that is institutionally committed to the fantasy that Islamic jihad terrorism is a twisting and hijacking of the peaceful religion of Islam, and that “white supremacists” pose a much greater terror threat to Americans today. Given this commitment to woke dogmas that are painfully false, how thorough could the vetting of these refugees possibly be? The military doesn’t even recognize that Islamic jihad exists as a concept; how is it going to be vigilant for signs of an inclination toward it?
The reality is that thousands of Afghans are being brought to the United States who can’t possibly have been adequately vetted, under circumstances in which it has never been easier for jihadis to infiltrate the refugee stream. Does anyone in the Biden administration even care to consider the possibility that they’re bringing in untold numbers of criminals and jihad terrorists? Or would pondering that be “Islamophobic”? Is getting the votes of these refugees and diminishing the voting power of patriotic Americans really more important than national security itself? Apparently so. And no one will pay any political price for this. Leftists never hesitate to implement disastrous policies because they are, for the most part, members of the cosseted elite who are shielded from the consequences of their own actions. And here yet again, it will be ordinary Americans who pay the price for Biden’s handlers’ folly.
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