New testimony from those directly involved in the Afghanistan withdrawal is shedding additional light on not only what went wrong, but contradictions to President Biden’s statements. In a transcribed interview before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, former Foreign Service officer Samuel Aronson said “Let me be clear,” he told lawmakers behind closed doors, “I cannot call this evacuation a success.”
President Joe Biden and his administration took little responsibility for its actions in the withdrawal, instead arguing that Biden was “severely constrained” by decisions made by President Trump, specifically the U.S.-Taliban Doha agreement.
Transcribed interviews from Aronson, who received a State Department commendation for his heroism during the evacuation, as well as Ambassador Ross Wilson, the last U.S. diplomat to leave Afghanistan, were obtained by RealClearPolitics and have not been published previously.
RealClearWire reports how Aronson recounted how American citizens, including children, were beaten by the Taliban, how U.S. passports were burned in a moment of panic when it seemed that Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul was about to be overrun, and how he delivered “a horrible choice” to a young Afghan mother.
“Get on the airplane and never see your husband again or exit the airport and lose your only chance at freedom,” Aronson told her, recalling for lawmakers the bleak exchange that summarized the mismanagement, and at times bureaucratic incompetence, of an evacuation that Biden himself had vowed would not be “at all comparable” to how the U.S. left Vietnam.
“There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy,” Biden told reporters in July 2021 as American forces began their withdrawal. The president insisted that after two decades of U.S. support, the Afghan army was well-equipped, well-trained, and capable of prosecuting their own war. They were not.
Aronson relived the impossible task of determining who should and should not be allowed inside the gates. He rejected the characterization later offered by State that the Taliban, whom the U.S. relied on at times to facilitate the departure of American citizens, was “businesslike and professional.”
RealClearWire reports on additional inconsistencies from the Biden administration:
“For all this talk of chaos, I just didn’t see it, not from my perch,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said as he argued back and forth with reporters when that document was released. Kirby served as Pentagon spokesman during the withdrawal and noted that flights left the airport “every 48 minutes” during the evacuation. “So I’m sorry,” he concluded, “I just won’t buy the whole argument of chaos.”
Managing the situation on the ground fell to Wilson, acting ambassador to Afghanistan. He testified that planning for a noncombatant evacuation operation (also known as an “NEO”) began in the spring of that year, and that Secretary of State Antony Blinken ordered the evacuation at his recommendation after the Taliban entered Kabul. Wilson told lawmakers, however, that he was not directly involved in planning the operation.
He also appeared unaware more than two years later that, per Department of Defense policy, he bore ultimate responsibility for the evacuation. “I believe that it was the responsibility of the chief of mission to call for an evacuation,” he testified, adding later that the operation itself would be carried out by “combatant command personnel who were not going to take orders from me.”
After the last U.S. flight left Kabul, Biden defiantly rejected any suggestion that an earlier evacuation order could have prevented more loss of life or allowed for “a more orderly” departure. Even if his administration evacuated just a month or two earlier, the president argued, “there still would have been a rush to the airport” and “a breakdown in confidence.”