Conservatives from every angle have spent this week publicly attacking, lambasting, and criticizing President Joe Biden for the rapidly escalating chaos this is currently going down in Afghanistan as we speak. Ex-President Donald Trump went so far as to publicly call for Biden’s resignation in one of his numerous “official” statements this week. They continually blame the President for the state of affairs in the Middle Eastern country after Biden withdrew American troops (just like Trump wanted to do when he was in office) and the Taliban took over much faster than anyone expected.
According to the Right, the lost lives of Afghan citizens lays at the feet of President Joe Biden. However, a new Axios report reveals something that we all already knew and one that a lot of us didn’t — President Biden and his team are scrambling day and night to save American allies in Afghanistan, something Donald Trump and his administration never even had a plan for when Donald planned to withdraw US troops during his term.
In preparation for this withdraw, there was reportedly a backlog of Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) applications that the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan was scrambling to get processed and completed on nothing more than a bare skeleton staff. However, as a result of the takeover, Afghan allies stuck directly between a rock and a hard place as the Taliban refuses to them through the airport without proper paperwork. The problem is, to acquire the proper paperwork, they would have to get the necessary documents from the Embassy staff… Who are currently at the airport.
As a result of such, Biden’s staff is working day and night to rush the process as much as humanly possible. They thought they had a pretty good handle on things and a good system to work through the backlog, but as General Mark Milley noted today, the Kabul fell faster than anyone ever would have dreamed.
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“These officials’ accounts of the bureaucratic, national security and health-related obstacles involved in protecting some of the most vulnerable and deserving Afghans may serve as a preview of testimony to come, as lawmakers and the American people demand answers about the botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan,” the report reads.
They faced down yet another hurdle back in March of 2020 when the U.S. Embassy in Kabul was forced to pause interviews and application processes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Within President Biden’s second week in office at the beginning of this year, they were reopened.
But this is the real kicker.
According to the Axios report, one official found themselves “alarmed” to find that “there was no plan from the Trump administration on how to move Afghan civilians out of the country, even though they had committed to leaving the country by May 1. So we began building one from scratch.”
That means for all the complaining and criticizing and yelling Donald Trump and his band of GOP idiots has done — the disgraced former guy never had a single plan to safely remove the innocent people of Afghanistan who have stood by American troops for 20 years as we fought in a “forever war” in their country.
You can read the full report from Axios here.
Featured image via Flickr/The White House
