Having underpromised and overdelivered his way to a solid start to his presidency, President Joe Biden inexplicably flipped the script on his Afghanistan withdrawal — to disastrous effect.
WASHINGTON — , not at all like the humiliating exit from Saigon a half-century earlier in Vietnam, and U.S. troops would stay until every American citizen who wanted out had been flown to safety.
And advocates for the tens of thousands of Afghans who helped the United States’ efforts there over the past two decades are beside themselves with anger and frustration. The majority of those Afghan allies and their families — a pool of some 88,000 earlier this year — remain in Afghanistan, with the new Taliban rulers searching them out and killing them.
“They should have challenged that assumption. They should have been asking: ‘What if, in the end, it all goes to hell?’” said Mark Jacobson, an Afghanistan war veteran who runs Syracuse University’s Maxwell School programs in Washington. “I think the collapse was quite possibly inevitable as soon as Trump signed his surrender.”
One administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity said that, while not optimal, American diplomats and armed forces still got 120,000 at-risk people out of the country in a matter of a few weeks — an accomplishment that would not have been possible without the groundwork that began soon after Biden took office.
Indeed, it was following that July speech that Biden complicated matters for himself by promising that the departure from Afghanistan would look nothing like the exit from Saigon 46 years earlier. “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan,” he said.And on Aug. 18, three days after the fall of Kabul, Bidenthat, notwithstanding his Aug.
He added, though, that Biden has opposed the Afghanistan War since 2009 when he was Barack Obama’s vice president, and even more so after the death of his son, Beau, following his diagnosis of brain cancer, which Biden believes was linked to the toxins he was exposed to during his deployment in Iraq.
No such planning, however, happened then. It wasn’t until 2009 that Congress passed a law providing for “special immigrant visas” for such Afghans, and it wasn’t until a tweaking of the language in Obama’s second term that the State Department implemented a system that began to work passably well.set the tone throughout his executive branch, including the State Department.
Biden administration officials point out that they did increase staffing in the Kabul embassy to process visas not long after taking office, and that flights out of the country for SIV-holders and their families began at the end of July, with more than 2,000 flown out of the country by the time Kabul fell to the Taliban two weeks later.
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