Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said Wednesday it was the State Department’s “call” not to begin evacuating U.S. citizens and Special Immigrant Visa holders sooner and more rapidly, which ultimately resulted in a chaotic airlift at the Kabul airport after the Taliban takeover, with potentially hundreds of U.S. citizens and tens of thousands of Afghan allies left behind.
The Pentagon chief made the revelation during a House Armed Services Committee hearing Wednesday, when Rep. James Langevin, a Rhode Island Democrat, pressed him on why the United States didn’t begin getting American citizens and SIV holders out sooner. Austin suggested that the Pentagon had wanted to get Americans out earlier but said it wasn’t the Department of Defense’s decision to make.
“The call on how to do that and when to do it is really a State Department call. We provided input … to the State Department,” Austin said. “Their concerns were, rightfully, that, No. 1, they were being cautioned by the Ghani administration that if they withdrew American citizens and SIV applicants at a pace that was too fast, it would cause a collapse of the government that we were trying to prevent.”
Austin continued: “And when you also add into the calculus that the SIV process was at that point very slow … we provided our input and we certainly would’ve liked to have seen it go faster or sooner, but again, they had a number of things to think through as well.”
Langevin also pushed Austin on why the U.S. chose to withdraw its forces in the summer of 2021, at the height of the Taliban fighting season, rather than waiting until the winter of 2022, when the Taliban could potentially be weaker. Austin replied that it was Biden’s decision.
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“In terms of why we chose to — why the president chose to leave in the summer versus waiting until the next year, obviously a number of things went into his decision calculus, but as we came on board, the agreement that had been made was that we were going to depart by May 1,” Austin said in reference to the withdrawal date the Trump administration agreed to with the Taliban in the February 2020 Doha agreement. “We were able to work to get more time to ensure that we could conduct a deliberate and safe and orderly retrograde, but again, we, we — the president made the decision that we would leave in the summer.”
The GOP has repeatedly pointed out that the chaotic withdrawal had serious consequences, including a deadly ISIS-K terrorist attack, American citizens and Afghan allies left behind, and potentially unvetted Afghans allowed into the U.S.
Biden was asked on July 8 whether there were any parallels between the exit from Afghanistan and the end of the Vietnam War.
“None whatsoever. Zero,” Biden said, adding, “The Taliban is not the South — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”
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But on Aug. 31, after the U.S. evacuation in Afghanistan ended and U.S. forces had left, the president argued such chaos was inevitable.
“Now, some say we should have started mass evacuations sooner and ‘Couldn’t this have be done — have been done in a more orderly manner?’ I respectfully disagree,” Biden said. “Imagine if we had begun evacuations in June or July, bringing in thousands of American troops and evacuating more than 120,000 people in the middle of a civil war. There still would have been a rush to the airport, a breakdown in confidence and control of the government, and it still would have been a very difficult and dangerous mission.”
He claimed, “The bottom line is: There is no evacuation from the end of a war that you can run without the kinds of complexities, challenges, and threats we faced. None.”
