Did U.S. officials hand the Taliban a list with names of Americans and Afghans eligible for evacuation? Or didn’t they?
Apparently, no one in the Biden administration knows, or at least no one can get their story straight.
Politico reported last week that U.S. officials negotiating with the Taliban gave the terrorist organization a list of names of American citizens, green card holders, and Afghan allies to be admitted through Taliban checkpoints outside the Kabul airport. One official familiar with the details described it as a “kill list” that the Taliban could use to identify U.S.-friendly targets who aren’t evacuated in time.
When asked about the report, State Department spokesman Ned Price denied that any such list exists.
“The idea that we are providing names or personally identifiable information to the Taliban in a way that exposes anyone to additional risk — that is simply wrong,” he said. “The notion that we are just providing [the Taliban] with names upon names of individuals who may stay behind in Afghanistan, or in a way that would expose anyone to additional risk — that is simply, simply false.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a similar denial during an interview with NBC News but eventually conceded that U.S. officials had handed over some type of passenger manifest:
“What was shared?” NBC’s Chuck Todd pressed.
“When you’re trying to get a bus or a group of people through and you need to show a manifest to do that, particularly in cases where people don’t have the necessary credentials on them or documents on them, then you’ll share names of the lists of people on the bus so they can be assured those are the people we’re looking to bring in. By definition, that’s exactly what’s happened,” Blinken explained.
Blinken is contradicting himself here. Either the United States gave the Taliban a list of people who needed to be let through the checkpoints or it didn’t. And if it did, we need to know whether the Americans and Afghan allies listed made it through those checkpoints. Were they all evacuated safely, or were some left behind? The Biden administration owes the public a better explanation of what happened than this half-hearted and self-contradictory denial.
