“We completed one of the biggest airlifts in history, with more than 120,000 people evacuated to safety,” President Joe Biden boasted from the White House State Dining Room on Aug. 31. That was just days after 13 U.S. service members were killed by a suicide bomber at the Kabul airport due to the disorderly nature of the evacuation.
Over 100,000 people sounds like an impressive figure, but who exactly was airlifted to safety? Biden wants you to believe that many of them were Afghans who had helped our troops against the Taliban. “We got thousands of Afghan translators and interpreters and others who supported the United States out as well,” Biden claimed.
But like just about everything else Biden has said about Afghanistan, this, too, turns out to be false.
“Nobody knows who was the good guy and who was the bad guy getting into the plane,” an Afghan translator who actually served with American forces told reporters at Dulles International Airport. “It’s a risky thing I believe happened.”
It turns out that the vast majority of those 120,000 rescued in Biden’s airlift had little or no connection to the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. They are just some of the millions of Afghans who wanted to leave their war-torn country for a better life.
When asked how many of the evacuees actually worked with the U.S., all Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas could offer was, “I can’t really quantify it or measure it against expectations.”
This isn’t remotely good enough.
A small fraction of those rescued are like the translator Mustafa, quoted above. They and their families will most likely qualify for the Special Immigrant Visa program, which, after an interview, fingerprinting, and a background check, grants them legal entry into the U.S.
But the vast majority of those rescued had not been screened at all. That won’t stop them from being brought to U.S. military bases on what Homeland Security is calling “humanitarian parole.” Up to 50,000 of these evacuees will be housed on military bases across the country, where they will be free to travel anywhere in the country they wish, so long as they do not violate any laws.
“These people have no reason to check back in because nobody is following up,” Rep. Tom Tiffany told the Washington Examiner after visiting Fort McCoy Army base in his Wisconsin district.
Asked who exactly the evacuees were, if not those who had worked with the United States, Mayorkas told reporters, “We will admit vulnerable Afghan women and girls, journalists, and other constituencies that need our relief, and we are very proud to deliver it.”
Proud as the Biden administration may be for giving out free flights and legal entry into the U.S., this is not what Biden promised people was happening in his Aug. 31 speech.
He sold people on a rescue of those who had specifically helped American military and diplomatic personnel in Afghanistan. Now, we know that was a false promise. The Biden administration was so disorganized and desperate that officials were just grabbing any Afghan who happened to be nearby and willing to get on a plane.
Our military deserved better than this botched withdrawal. So did our diplomats, our Afghan allies, and the unknown number of Americans still trapped inside Afghanistan. So did our nation as a whole. Unfortunately, we seem unlikely to get the truth from the Biden administration.
