Joe Biden has called the 2021 U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan an “extraordinary success,” but a former State Department official who was there says the president is flat out wrong.
When hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians flooded Hamid Karzai International Airport in August 2021, former State Department officer Sam Aronson traded his pen and paper for flash grenades and night vision goggles.
His diplomatic tools were replaced by war tools, an indication, Aronson said, that the plan had gone terribly wrong.
“Let me be clear: I cannot call this evacuation a success,” he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee last fall, according to a copy of his testimony obtained by DailyMail.com.
“More than 200 people have been killed or injured, and thousands more, like me, are left with invisible scars and moral wounds,” he said.
The U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan cost 13 Americans after a suicide bomber attacked a crowd trying to enter Hamid Karzai International Airport. The attack also killed more than 150 Afghans
As the Taliban took control of the country in 2021, US military and diplomatic leaders began drawing up plans to evacuate the country
Videos posted during the evacuation show swarms of people clamoring to get to the airport and board American fighting ships. Some reports even show Afghans desperately clinging to the outside of US military aircraft in the hope of being rescued from Taliban rule. At least one of these individuals on the outside of the plane later died after falling off
One of the most frightening situations in the saga, Aronson said, was the heartbreaking ultimatum he had to give an Afghan mother.
“I remember giving a terrible choice to a young mother whose husband was stopped by the Taliban: get on a plane and never see your husband again, or leave the airport and lose your only chance at freedom.”
“I live with memories of women and men walking through barbed wire and cutting up their bodies, hoping I would let them into the airport,” he continued.
He also said he had to use buses to get transportation because no U.S. officials had access to vehicles when landing at the airport.
“The problem was that the vehicles you had one morning were probably not the vehicles you had later that day, because there were a finite number of vehicles and we all – or many elements of the response had to steal vehicles from each other. ‘
The operation had tragic consequences for the Afghans and American personnel.
Aronson said that when he returned to the U.S. after the surgery, he was in physical pain due to the harsh conditions at the airport.
And despite a promise from Secretary of State Antony Blinken that employees would not be punished for seeking therapy and mental health care after the mission, he was denied leave and told that if he wanted to take a day off, he would have to foot the bill. must pay.
When he was later assigned to Iraq, he told his supervisor that he was having psychological problems related to his previous deployment to Afghanistan and requested another project that would prevent his post-traumatic stress disorder from developing.
His supervisor was distant and the situation led to his desire to find a job outside the government, away from “the bullets flying over my head.”
People stranded at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border await its reopening after it was closed by the Taliban, who took control of the Afghan side of the border at Chaman, Pakistan, August 11, 2021
People are struggling to cross the border wall of Hamid Karzai International Airport to flee the country
Aronson’s testimony provides insight into how the shoddy withdrawal affected those on the ground, and how the mission the president hailed as a success is far from it.
In total, the operation managed to get more than 120,000 Afghans out of the Taliban-ruled country in less than two weeks.
“The extraordinary success of this mission was due to the incredible skill, courage and selfless courage of the United States military and our diplomats and intelligence professionals,” Biden said after the last airlift left Afghanistan.
The White House has taken little responsibility for the worrying withdrawal, often reminding reporters how they were “severely constrained” by Trump-era deals such as the Doha accord.
But last month, two now-retired top generals responsible for the withdrawal said the blame should fall on the shoulders of the policymakers in charge at the time of the operation.
“I continue to believe that if there is any culpability in this attack, it lies in policy decisions that created the environment,” retired Gen. Frank McKenzie testified at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing in March .
‘CThe responsibility and responsibility does not lie with the troops on the ground,” he added.
At the time, he was against withdrawing troops from the country and has recently talked about how that decision has directly led to a growing threat that ISIS could attack the US and its allies.
Retired Gen. Mark Milley also laid blame at the State Department and the executive branch during the hearing.
Former Gens. Mark Milley (L) and Kenneth McKenzie (R) testified that the State Department acted too slowly in ordering the evacuation of Americans from Afghanistan
A helicopter with a Taliban flag flies above Taliban supporters who have gathered to celebrate the US withdrawal of all its troops from Afghanistan
“On August 14 (2021), the decision to evacuate noncombatants was made by the State Department and the U.S. military was alerted, mobilized, and rapidly deployed more quickly than any military in the world ever would,” Milley said.
“I believe that decision came too late.”
Milley also said that if he could make the decision again, he would have begun the evacuation more than a month before the withdrawal was ordered by State Department and White House officials.
“I would have called the embassy and the foreign ministry with the army in mid-July,” he said. “If anything else were to happen, that would be it.”