President Joe Biden is under scrutiny for his halting response to the thousands of Afghans who worked alongside the U.S. military mission as Taliban insurgents cemented control of the country.
“They understand that they miscalculated,” said Alexander McCoy, a Marine Corps veteran and the political director for Common Defense, a liberal advocacy group led by veterans. “I believe that they are scrambling to make adjustments. And, you know, there will be a time for accountability and for figuring out what went wrong and why.”
As time ticked toward an Aug. 31 deadline to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan, the Biden administration pressed other countries to receive Afghans who qualify for Special Immigrant Visas, which are aimed at people who worked as interpreters, advisers, or locally as U.S. Embassy staff. The Defense Department hopes to evacuate 22,000 special visa applicants, their families, and others.
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“Because the administration was reluctant to bring them straight to the United States, months of time was wasted negotiating with countries like Qatar and Kuwait and Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and Kosovo,” McCoy said. “Many of these countries do not have good human rights records themselves. And some of these countries have active Taliban presence inside of them — they would not have necessarily been safe havens.”
McCoy, who is in frequent touch with the Biden administration over veterans’ and refugee issues, declined to speculate about the reason for the slow pace of the evacuations, but he said officials missed the mark in failing to anticipate the outcry.
“They may have been surprised by how strongly the veteran community feels about our Afghan allies,” said McCoy, calling it a “miscalculation” to presume “that the only thing we cared about was getting Americans to safety.”
He added, “The people who have been advocating to end this war are doing so in part because we care about the Afghan people.”
According to reports, Biden harbored concerns over the political optics of Afghan refugees arriving into the country and preferred that they travel to other nations. Resettlement groups have said that some 80,000 SIV applicants and their families needed to be evacuated.
“If that is true, that would be a shameful reason. And there’s going to be Afghans who pay with their lives,” McCoy said.
The Biden administration has denied that political considerations slowed its response, telling the Washington Examiner, “This is not true.”
“We would never let the prospect of bad-faith criticism from the same people who orchestrated the Muslim ban and decimated America’s refugee pipeline keep us from keeping faith with our Afghan partners and others seeking protection under our laws,” a senior administration official said. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
The delay recalled Biden’s flip-flop earlier this year after pledging to lift a Trump-era refugee cap. Under political pressure as record numbers of migrants arrived at the southern U.S. border, Biden wavered on a campaign promise to boost the number of refugee admissions into the country before buckling under political pressure from Democrats.
“It’s like they want the credit from liberals for ending the Trump cruelty to immigrants and refugees, but they also don’t want the political backlash that comes from actual refugees arriving in America in any sort of large numbers,” one administration official told Politico this week.
Days after the Taliban had cemented control of Kabul, senior officials continued to work the phones to finalize arrangements with third-country hosts.
In a call with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama on Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken broached Rama’s “offer to temporarily take in Afghans in need,” according to a readout published on Thursday.
“We knew we were going to get these people out, and we wasted too much time over the past several months with efforts to try to find some other country to host them,” McCoy said.
On Monday, Biden charged that the reason so few Afghan refugees had left the country was because people “did not want to leave earlier.” The remarks drew scorn for seeming to place the blame on the Afghans themselves. At the same time, videos from Kabul’s airport showed dozens of people crowding a plane leaving the runway, clinging to its side.
The U.S. has evacuated 9,000 people from the country since Saturday and 14,000 since the end of July, but a backlog of thousands more SIV applicants remain. Some 18,000 Afghans who had applied for special immigrant visas and their families remained in Afghanistan as of last weekend while the Taliban seized control of Kabul. Pentagon officials have said they hope to ramp up the airlift to evacuate 5,000 to 9,000 people per day.
The State Department said that about 6,000 people were cleared for evacuation Thursday.
“This is an operation that will continue at as fast a clip as we can possibly manage,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters.
According to a White House official, the U.S. evacuated 3,000 people from Kabul on Thursday on 16 C-17 flights, including 350 Americans. These totals include U.S. citizens, embassy personnel, special visa applicants, and other evacuees.
Security threats outside Kabul’s airport have complicated access for evacuees, as has a lack of consistent guidance, and the hazard of holding onto documents to prove eligibility for evacuation as Taliban militants target people with those ties, McCoy said.
The State Department said it is doubling the number of consular officers at Kabul’s airport to process more visas, but Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, a Democrat, said this wasn’t enough.
“I recently received an update — I mean, literally, just a few minutes ago — from the State Department that they have 20 consular officers on the ground in Kabul, and, wait for it, they’re surging to 40, 40 consular officers,” Moulton said on Thursday during an event hosted by the Center for a New American Security. “This is the greatest foreign policy disaster that we’ve seen in a very long time, and they’re sending 40 people to deal with it? I mean, that’s absurd.”
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He added, “We’ve got 6,000 troops on the ground. We need a little bit more effort than 40 consular officers from the United States State Department.“
