Republicans on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations have recently released a new report that sheds light on the actual estimate of how many Americans remain in Afghanistan after the Biden administration finalized the pull out of U.S. troops in August 2021.
The committee is led by Ranking Member Sen. Jim Risch, a Republican leader from Idaho and they provided an estimate that cast doubt on the official tally of the U.S. State Department.
The report titled "Left Behind: A Brief Assessment of the Biden Administration's Strategic Failures during the Afghanistan Evacuation" was released last week and highlight the effects of the Biden administration's withdrawal of the last U.S. troops from Afghanistan in late August last year following almost 20 years of America's military presence in the Middle Eastern country.
The report summary recounted how on August 31, 2021, the Biden administration concluded the pull out of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, a move described by the Republican leaders as a "failure of senior Biden Administration leadership." They stressed how the failure to plan led to a "rushed evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Americans, third-country nationals, and Afghans."
"It left behind hundreds, possibly thousands, of American citizens, tens of thousands of Afghan partners, and a legacy of betrayal of American allies," the report lamented. It also reported how between August 15 to 31, the U.S. "completed its largest air evacuation," which in fact was "marred by a lack of planning, coordination, and communication."
According to the Christian Post, Republicans accused the Biden administration for failing to have a "clear system of how to contact evacuees and processes to allow them into the airport," which resulted in many Americans, U.S. legal permanent residents and other Afghan allies left behind to live under Taliban rule.
In Chapter 2 of the report, the Republican leaders underscored how Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in September 2021 that there were just about a hundred to 150 Americans who were still in Afghanistan and wanted to leave. But they argued that Sec. Blinken's statistics do no match that of the State Department and Department of Defense, which reported 10,000 to 15,000 Americans as of August 17, and 6,000 Americans as of August 31, respectively.
Taking these statistics into consideration, there would be more or less 4,000 to 9,000 more Americans remaining in Afghanistan, a way larger number than Sec. Blinken's 150 estimate.
"My report describes how the Biden Administration's failure of duty allowed for a quick Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and a botched withdrawal that left hundreds of Americans and tens of thousands of Afghan partners behind," Risch said in a statement. "The United States will have to deal with the fallout of this failure for years to come, so it is imperative that we mitigate the strategic implications to ensure we do not repeat mistakes."
The White House fired back against Risch's report, however, accusing Republican leaders of doing "next to nothing" to address the Trump administration's handling of Afghanistan, The Hill reported. A White House spokesperson argued that the Biden administration had to work on a "refugee resettlement program" that had been dismantled by the previous administration.
A State Department spokesperson also placed blame on the Trump administration for causing the Biden administration to inherit "an SIV program that had been deliberately slowed and a refugee resettlement program that had been decimated" by the Trump administration.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that the Biden administration's poor handling of the pullout from Afghanistan caused a lot of problems to Americans, Christians, women, and U.S. allies, not to mention leave the more than $85 billion cache of weapons, equipments and vehicles to the Taliban.
Risch's report concluded that the Biden administration "squandered precious time, ignored intelligence and recommendations from people on the ground, and refused bipartisan support to give them the resources to succeed."
