Joe Biden has called the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 an “extraordinary success,” but a former State Department official who was there says the president is dead wrong.
As hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians flooded Hamid Karzai International Airport in August 2021, former State Department Foreign Service official Sam Aronson traded in his pen and paper for stun grenades and night-vision goggles.
His tools of diplomacy were replaced by instruments of war, an indication, Aronson said, that the plan had gone horribly 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 were killed or injured, and thousands more, like me, struggle with invisible scars and moral wounds,” he said.
The US 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.
When the Taliban took control of the country in 2021, American military leaders and diplomats began drawing up plans to evacuate the country.
Videos released during the evacuation show swarms of people clamoring to enter the airport to board American fighter jets. Some posts even show Afghans desperately clinging to the outside of US military planes in the hope of saving themselves from Taliban rule. At least one of the people outside the plane later died after falling.
One of the most painful situations in the saga, Aronson said, was the heartbreaking ultimatum he had to tell an Afghan mother.
“I remember giving a young mother whose husband was detained by the Taliban a horrible choice: get on the plane and never see her husband again, or leave the airport and lose her only chance for freedom.”
“I live with memories of women and men walking through barbed wire, cutting their bodies, for the opportunity to allow them into the airport,” he continued.
He also described having to connect buses to get transportation because no US officials had access to the 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 answer, had to steal vehicles from each other. ‘
The operation had tragic consequences for the Afghans and for American personnel.
Aronson said that when he returned to the United States after the operation he was in physical pain due to the harsh conditions at the airport.
And despite Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s promise that employees would not be penalized for seeking therapy and mental care after the mission, he was denied permission and told that if he wanted to take a day off, he would have to pay the bill.
Later, when assigned to a deployment in Iraq, he told his supervisor that he was suffering from mental issues related to his previous deployment to Afghanistan and requested a different project that would prevent his PTSD from triggering.
His supervisor seemed distant and the situation led him to look for a job outside the government and away “from the bullets flying over my head.”
People stranded at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border wait for its reopening after it was closed by the Taliban, who have assumed control of the Afghan side of the border in Chaman, Pakistan, on August 11, 2021.
People struggle to cross the border wall at Hamid Karzai International Airport to flee the country.
Aronson’s testimony gives insight into how the careless withdrawal affected the people on the ground, and how the mission the president called a success is far from it.
In total, the operation managed to remove more than 120,000 Afghans from the Taliban-ruled country in less than two weeks.
“The extraordinary success of this mission was due to the incredible skill, bravery, and selfless courage of the United States military and our diplomats and intelligence professionals,” Biden said after the final airlift left Afghanistan.
The White House has taken little responsibility for the troubling withdrawal, often reminding reporters that they were “severely constrained” by Trump-era agreements such as the Doha Agreement.
But last month, two now-retired top generals in charge of the withdrawal said the blame should fall on the policymakers in charge at the time of the operation.
“I remain of the view that if there is blame for this attack, it lies in the political decisions that created the environment,” retired Gen. Frank McKenzie testified during a hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in March.
‘C“The blame and responsibility do not rest with the troops on the ground,” he added.
At the time he was against removing military service members from the country and recently said that decision has directly led to a growing threat that ISIS could attack the United States and its allies.
Retired Gen. Mark Milley also blamed the State Department and the executive branch during the hearing.
Ancient 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 gathered to celebrate the US withdrawal of all its troops from Afghanistan.
“On August 14 (2021), the State Department made the noncombatant evacuation operation decision and the U.S. military was alerted, mobilized, and rapidly deployed faster than any military in the world would,” Milley said. .
“In my opinion, 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 State Department and White House officials ordered the withdrawal.
“I would have brought the embassy and the State Department with the military in mid-July,” he said. “If there was a do-over, that would be it.”