Frustrated veteran lawmakers pointed the finger at the Aug. 31 deadline for getting all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan for creating chaos and panic at Kabul’s airport as Americans, Afghan translators, and allies scramble to evacuate the country as the Taliban take hold.
“The Aug. 31 deadline is contributing to the chaos and the panic at the airport because you have Afghans who think that they have 10 days to get out of this country or that door is closing forever,” Michigan Republican Rep. Peter Meijer said Friday during a veteran lawmaker panel with two Republicans and two Democrats hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Hawaii Democratic Rep. Kai Kahele, a member of the Hawaii Air National Guard, concurred that the deadline “is leading to a panicked situation.”
In an interview with ABC on Wednesday, President Joe Biden said that whether troops stay beyond the Aug. 31 deadline “depends on where we are and whether we can get — ramp these numbers up to 5,000 to 7,000 a day coming out.” He committed to keeping a troop presence to evacuate Americans, but not necessarily for the tens of thousands of allies and their families trying to flee the country.
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“We continue to push and call on the administration as a group, and as a coalition, for a commitment to stay as long as necessary to evacuate not just American citizens, but our Afghan partners,” said Democratic Colorado Rep. Jason Crow, a former Army Ranger who was awarded a Bronze Star and a co-chair of the Honoring Our Promises Working Group that advocates for protections for Afghan translators and interpreters.
Kahele flew the same model of C-17 aircraft in Afghanistan that was shown earlier this week packed with hundreds of evacuees and swarmed by Afghans on the Kabul airport tarmac. Pilots train for years before flying the aircraft on missions.
“Operational specifics on how to floor load 700 people on a C-17 — they don’t teach you that,” Kahele said. “The most important thing for an aircraft and their aircrew is that the airfield is 100% secure, and clearly, it has not been over the last few days.”
Nebraska Republican Rep. Don Bacon, a 30-year Air Force veteran who retired as a brigadier general, co-founded the bipartisan For Country Caucus of Veterans in Congress, whose members pledge to not campaign against each other in an attempt to foster policy consensus.
“We were all just stunned by the events that have transpired,” Bacon said. “You pull out our troops without certain conditions, and, like, you’re going to have a failure.”
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“I’m on WhatsApp conversations every day with a half-dozen individuals who are trying to get into that base — you know, some who have paperwork, some who are in that pipeline, all of whom are moving house to house, different night at a different location, because they are being followed by the Taliban,” said Meijer, who was an Army Reserve intelligence specialist who helped coordinate evacuations on a much smaller scale. “We put a man on the moon. I think we can get American citizens and Afghan allies that are a couple of blocks away in Kabul.”
Crow warned against blaming intelligence failure for the swift Taliban takeover of Kabul.
“It’s too early to say whether that is true,” he said.
