While Biden's panicked evacuation from Afghanistan was going on, it had failed so badly that staffers from his own wife’s office were contacting private rescue groups to get people out.
This is one of the many damning revelations in the report by Rep. McCaul for the Republican minority on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The interim report, "A Strategic Failure" was conducted despite every possible effort by the White House and House Democrats to stop it, including blocking information requests and keeping briefings unnecessarily classified.
With the revelations that the State Department is actively refusing to cooperate with the Special Inspector General on Afghanistan Reconstruction, this report is more urgent than ever.
Forced to rely on personal interviews and public non-classified testimony, the report reveals that Biden had made it a "priority" to maintain an embassy in Kabul even after he had withdrawn the troops and the country was on the verge of falling to the advancing Taliban terror forces.
“POTUS was publicly making it clear that this was a priority. Ambassador Wilson began stating that ‘I am maniacal about the Embassy remaining in Kabul,’” a military officer described.
Secretary of State Blinken and other State Department officials in D.C. and in Kabul refused to consider the possibility of a Taliban takeover. Only Blinken and his department could order an evacuation, and they refused to seriously plan for one until a week before the fall of Kabul.
Military officials were prevented from even discussing an evacuation, being told, “don’t say NEO” and “This is not a NEO for Afghanistan.” NEO stands for Non-Combatant Evacuation.
Biden’s refusal to listen to advisers who told him to maintain a minimal military force on the ground almost led to an even worse disaster as the only remaining airport was overrun.
With American forces under fire, Air Force pilots and maintenance personnel were handed guns and told to stand guard. Had the Taliban wanted to overrun the airport, they could have done so.
The report notes that, "most of the officers working at the Joint Operations Center were also pressed into security duties as the mob got within 150 meters of that key command center."
And the abandoned and isolated military personnel on the ground were under Taliban fire.
The military helicopters evacuating the embassy had to evade "constant" enemy fire. The airport guard towers “received small arms fire throughout the day" and Taliban mortars forced the closure of the airport. The suicide bombing that killed 13 service members was the inevitable result of Biden’s bad decisions which turned the American presence in Kabul into ‘Fort Apache’.
With no plan, deprived of proper military support, isolated in a small strip of land, surrounded by armed enemies and dangerous mobs, Biden led American military personnel into a trap.
Biden lied, Americans died.
While the State Department’s focus on Biden’s “priority” of maintaining an embassy led directly to the wretched scenes of American citizens being beaten by the Taliban and left behind under fire, Biden’s military brass also has plenty to answer for.
The Taliban had offered, 'Why don't you just take security for all of Kabul.' Gen. McKenzie replied, “That was not my instruction”. The Taliban had urged, “We want you to have it,”
That would have required thousands more troops that Biden refused to authorize.
Gen. McKenzie had initially planned to tell the Taliban to stop outside the city, but in the meeting instead told the Islamic terrorism group that he had "no opinion" on them taking the city.
Instead of trying to secure the city for an evacuation, the Biden administration and its generals outsourced the job to the Taliban with horrifying results for our citizens and our prestige.
Adding to the disgrace, British, French and other NATO members went out into Kabul to rescue their own people, while our own generals refused to do likewise and tried to discourage them.
“U.S. commanders were angered by allied troops leaving the perimeter of HKIA to rescue their respective citizens, expressing concern these movements could draw a negative reaction from the Taliban,” the report notes. Biden’s brass were more concerned about the Taliban’s reaction than about getting all the Americans trapped behind enemy lines out of the country.
And so over 800 American citizens were abandoned by Biden behind Taliban enemy lines.
American women would have been among those who, the report reveals, “were beaten and shot at for not being accompanied by a male, sexually assaulted, trampled, and forced to stand in wastewater for hours”.
“If there's American citizens left, we're gonna stay to get them all out,” Biden had promised.
It was one of his many lies.
The McCaul report carefully documents the complete contradiction between the Biden administration’s claims about the evacuation and the realities on the ground. The most damning evidence of that are the efforts by Jill Biden and Kamala’s people to contact private rescue groups to get people out instead of operating through their own administration.
Biden claimed that his withdrawal was carried out with the support and consent of military leaders and allies, and that no one had foreseen a rapid Taliban takeover.
In reality, he had been "warned repeatedly that the return of the Taliban was a question of when, not if" and that "the resurgence of al Qaeda" was "the most likely scenario".
Biden was aware of this and lied anyway.
NATO allies vehemently opposed Biden's unconditional withdrawal to such a degree that Secretary Blinken had phoned his boss from a NATO summit to tell him he had gotten a "jolt" in "in quadraphonic sound" opposing the move. His own military advisers had told him not to do it.
Nothing Biden and his people said about their botched evacuation from Afghanistan was true.
After withdrawing forces while leaving thousands of Americans behind on the ground, Biden reluctantly approved a limited evacuation whose military personnel were cut off from the start. Mobs overran the airport, with mostly young men filling up planes which took off. The State Department failed to plan for an evacuation or vet evacuees leading to dozens of Afghans with terror ties coming to America and massive backups of Afghan evaucees abroad.
After its Saigon moment, the Biden administration has been paying "approximately $300,000 per flight to a Taliban controlled airline in order to allow U.S. citizens and Afghan allies to continue evacuating." Air Taliban is being funded by the United States with State Department officials confirming “that the cash-strapped Taliban are profiting from these payments.“
The Taliban had every incentive to sabotage our evacuation to profit from Air Taliban.
Sizable quantities of weapons and equipment have fallen into the hands of the Taliban. Some family members of Americans, including military personnel, are still trapped in Afghanistan.
Despite the withdrawal, massive amounts of our money continue flowing to the Taliban in the form of hostage payments and foreign aid. Al Qaeda freely operates in Afghanistan and the United States of America suffered an unprecedented disgrace, abandoning citizens and allies.
A year later, the interim report from the Republican minority on the House Foreign Affairs Committee is only the beginning of the effort to expose the truth about Biden’s betrayal.
But it is an important step in the fight against the lies and the spin from the man who did it all.
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