The United States has suffered a grave national humiliation in Afghanistan. President Biden’s disastrous withdrawal has brought shame to a nation that fought, bled, and sacrificed for two long decades after September 11. Defeat can be imposed by an enemy but humiliation is self-inflicted—and in this case it was inflicted on America by the President of the United States.
To the thousands of Americans who fought bravely in Afghanistan, I share your dismay and I want to tell you: this was not your fault. This failure was not caused by our exceptional troops, who fought with courage and skill against a determined and ruthless enemy. Our warriors lost no battles and surrendered to no enemy. They fought on the highest summits of American armed conflict and descended into the darkest pits of evil. Our men and women in uniform made us proud and filled us with awe. This loss is not their loss.
The debacle in Afghanistan also was not the fault of our people. The American people contributed hundreds of billions of dollars to a just cause and endured a prolonged conflict for almost a generation. No, our people and our warriors did not fail. Our leaders did. And none failed more conspicuously than a commander-in-chief who could not command events.
Joe Biden has been paving the path to ruin for over a decade. Many have been wrong about the war in Afghanistan but few have been more wrong more consistently than this president. During the Obama administration, Joe Biden wrongly argued that America could strike terrorists from “over the horizon,” wrongly set a public timeline for withdrawing our troops, and wrongly opposed the secret mission to kill Osama bin Laden. Yet he stood by when President Obama when he released several high-value Taliban officials from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for an American traitor, Bowe Bergdahl.
As president, Joe Biden has extended his perfect record of terrible judgment. He was wrong about evacuating Bagram airbase, wrong about the likelihood that the Taliban would take over Afghanistan, and wrong that the Taliban cared about its international reputation. He also believed, wrongly and incredibly, that we could trust the Taliban to secure the Kabul airport and help us evacuate our people.
The president’s inexhaustible ineptitude has created this fiasco. According to official estimates, over a hundred Americans and thousands of green-card holders are currently stranded in a country run by terrorists. The much-vaunted “airlift” that the president pretends is an “extraordinary success” evacuated fewer than half of approved Special Immigrant Visa holders. That includes thousands of Afghans who fought loyally alongside our troops and have now been abandoned to torture and execution at the hands of the Taliban. The allies of Al Qaeda now rule in Kabul, the Taliban is armed with billions of dollars of U.S. military equipment, and those Guantanamo Bay detainees, released under the Obama administration, now serve at the highest levels of the Afghan government.
My office has received many first-hand reports of Taliban insurgents going house to house, hunting for American allies. Former Afghan pilots are especially high-risk targets who are being tracked down and brutally murdered. And of course, we’ve all seen the disturbing videos of desperate Afghans clinging to an American transport plane and plummeting to their death on the tarmac below .
I will admit that I had low expectations for Joe Biden’s presidency, yet he still failed to meet them.
When I served in Afghanistan, I saw the Taliban’s grim handiwork up close. I witnessed the sacrifices of brave Americans and Afghans to prevent them from regaining power. So when this disaster unfolded, I determined to do whatever I could to get our people to safety.
Soon after the fall of Kabul, my office established an email hotline for evacuation requests, created a war room to help those in need, and established contact with assets on the ground. Members of my team did everything from providing required forms and up-to-date information to helping orchestrate daring midnight evacuations. We facilitated the escape of high-ranking members of the Afghan government and military, along with wounded children and pregnant mothers—several of whom were actively being hunted by Taliban death squads. We also helped dozens of students from a Christian missionary school reach safety, before they suffered the cruel treatment that Islamic terrorists reserve for so-called “apostates” and followers of the Gospel.
My staff worked around the clock, volunteering their time, energy, and on several occasions their own resources to help those in need. One staff member repeatedly drove to Dulles airport to deliver clothes to needy Afghans. Another sent school supplies to a recently returned second grader.
All of us heard harrowing stories from the ground. A member of my team was on the phone with an American citizen as Taliban thugs attacked her and brutally assaulted her driver on their way to the airport. This same woman was on the phone with my office outside the Kabul airport when Taliban guards started shooting in the air and caused a stampede. Luckily, thanks to cooperation with my staff, military personnel at the gate were able to pull her to safety before she was potentially crushed by the stampeding mob. I would remind the Senate that Joe Biden and Tony Blinken empowered the men that beat and then almost killed an American citizen, while a member of my office was on the phone with her.
The extraordinary efforts of my staff in Washington and Arkansas produced exceptional results: from the beginning of the crisis to today, we contacted more than 2,500 individuals seeking assistance and helped more than 300 American citizens and legal permanent residents to safely evacuate, along with over 200 other vulnerable Afghans, many of whom were immediate family of those Americans and permanent residents. I want to thank my staff for their incredible and selfless work. I sincerely believe that these actions have redeemed in some measure the honor and trust that President Biden squandered this past month. And I want to acknowledge the many other aides, Democrat and Republican, House and Senate, who also pitched in to help our fellow citizens.
But for every tale of sacrifice, daring, and courage that ended in a plane ride to safety, there were also tales of tragedy, heartbreak, and failure.
Unfortunately, many of the wounds that we suffered during the Afghan withdrawal were once again self-inflicted. Those of us involved in the rescue effort had a front-row seat to the Biden administration’s ineptitude. I think it’s worth recounting some of those stories, as well.
On one notable occasion, my office was contacted by a group of three American women who had traveled to a site that was reportedly being used to shuttle people to the airport for evacuation.
When they arrived, a group of Taliban fighters pointed guns in their faces and refused to let them pass. The women called a member of my staff for help, who promptly called the State Department for guidance. The State Department’s initial response—to Americans held at gunpoint—was to ask whether they had filled out an online form to request evacuation. When my staff pressed the matter further, the State Department told them, “our best advice is not to give advice.”
This casual indifference to the plight of American citizens was not an isolated incident. On a separate occasion, my staff learned that a State Department employee told an American citizen who refused to leave Afghanistan without her family that she was, “being really annoying right now.” I suppose she was just one more inconvenient American spoiling Joe Biden’s extraordinary success.
On another occasion, I received a phone call from the ambassador of a country in the region. His government wanted to know what to do about dozens of American-trained Afghan soldiers and their families who had fled to his country in order to escape the Taliban. The only problem was that the ambassador’s government couldn’t get any senior official from the White House or State Department to return their calls—not so much as a “thank you, please hold what you got, we’ll be back to you with help soon.” It was radio silence from America while the Taliban continued to demand a return of those troops. Thankfully, I was able to work with Senator Coons to get the message through to the administration. After much confusion and delay, a State Department official finally returned the ambassador’s call. I want to thank Senator Coons for his assistance. The episode was a reminder that this body still works and bipartisanship is possible when the stakes are high.
Even some members of the executive branch have acknowledged that the administration’s policy has been a catastrophe. On more than one occasion, my staff received calls from officials in the government asking for our help to evacuate people from Afghanistan. In other words, members of the executive branch of the most powerful nation on Earth were going to a lone, free-lancing Senate office for help instead of their own State Department or White House.
President Biden has refused to lead and refused to protect those he took an oath to protect. So it fell to the rest of us to shoulder the load and get Americans to safety.
Thankfully, Americans remain a generous and courageous people—and we stepped up to meet this moment. Over the past weeks, countless normal citizens volunteered to help people they had never met. Veterans reunited for one last mission to help their old battle buddies get to safety. And of course, thousands of American troops risked their lives to help others in a distant land far from home. Thirteen of them made the ultimate sacrifice on the noble mission to rescue their countrymen, who will never forget their sacrifice, and nor will we. They performed bravely a job that they never should’ve had to perform.
Joe Biden’s Afghanistan crisis will live in infamy as one of the worst strategic blunders in our nation’s history. But the response of so many Americans to save their fellow citizens and our allies showed the very best of our country. I’m proud that my office was able to play some small part in that redemptive story.
Poor leadership comes and goes, but our national character endures. Americans have shown that we are still capable of noble and heroic deeds, even and maybe especially when politicians in Washington fail in their duty. Our nation is still exceptional, even if the president is a mediocrity.
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