‘I Cannot Call Evacuation a Success’: New Details of Afghanistan Chaos

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Real Clear Politics

New testimony from those who witnessed firsthand the confusion and chaos of the Afghanistan withdrawal further contradicts President Biden’s assertion that the hurried and violent end to the longest war in American history was an “extraordinary success.”

In a transcribed interview before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, former Foreign Service officer Samuel Aronson said the very opposite in living, harrowing color. “Let me be clear,” he told lawmakers behind closed doors, “I cannot call this evacuation a success.”

The questions and answers from Aronson, who received a State Department commendation for his heroism during the evacuation, as well as Ambassador Ross Wilson, the last U.S. diplomat to leave Afghanistan, were obtained by RealClearPolitics and have not been published previously.

Aronson recounted how American citizens, including children, were beaten by the Taliban, how U.S. passports were burned in a moment of panic when it seemed that Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul was about to be overrun, and how he delivered “a horrible choice” to a young Afghan mother.

“Get on the airplane and never see your husband again or exit the airport and lose your only chance at freedom,” Aronson told her, recalling for lawmakers the bleak exchange that summarized the mismanagement, and at times bureaucratic incompetence, of an evacuation that Biden himself had vowed would not be “at all comparable” to how the U.S. left Vietnam.

“There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy,” Biden told reporters in July 2021 as American forces began their withdrawal. The president insisted that after two decades of U.S. support, the Afghan army was well-equipped, well-trained, and capable of prosecuting their own war. They were not.

Kabul fell to the Taliban on Aug. 15, the day the U.S. Embassy was evacuated. Emergency operations subsequently shifted to HKIA. What some call chaos followed.

Aronson recalled hotwiring buses to ferry the massive crush of humanity that descended on the airport and the sometimes impossible task of determining who should and should not be allowed inside the gates. He rejected the characterization later offered by State that the Taliban, whom the U.S. relied on at times to facilitate the departure of American citizens, was “businesslike and professional.”