When President Biden announced the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan on April 14, one component of that withdrawal was notably missing from his speech: How the United States would help the thousands of Afghans who assisted the U.S. over the past two decades.
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Now, four months later, the United States is scrambling to evacuate tens of thousands of Afghans and U.S. citizens after the Biden administration incorrectly predicted how the withdrawal would impact the security and stability of Afghanistan.
During that time, the Biden administration has given no fewer than nine reasons for the slow evacuation of Afghan allies. (You can watch examples in the video above.)
4 key questions about Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal
In the months following Biden’s speech, administration officials repeatedly emphasized the need to help the Afghans who helped the United States, but details on how that would happen were often scant.
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When asked on April 21 whether the United States would be able to process tens of thousands of Afghan applicants by the then-Sept. 11, 2021, withdrawal date, State Department spokesman Ned Price simply said that the United States was “deeply committed” to “promptly” processing applicants, before noting that the coronavirus pandemic had slowed processing.
On May 6, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, downplayed the applicant backlog by pointing to the stability of Afghanistan.
“I think it’s a bit early to really sound the alarm on getting everybody out just yet,” Milley said. “That’s my own personal opinion, but I think that’s based on some pretty good knowledge of what’s going on right now.”
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On May 18, the U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, told Congress that evacuating Afghan allies too quickly could backfire.
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“We don’t want to signal panic and the departure of all educated Afghans by worst-casing and undermining the morale of the Afghan security forces,” Khalilzad said.
On June 20, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Congress needed to help “streamline” the applicant process.
“We are working with Congress right now … to actually streamline some of the requirements that slow this process down,” Sullivan told ABC News. “And we are doing the kind of extensive planning for potential evacuation should that become necessary.”
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By July 8, Biden was pointing to restrictions in the Special Immigrant Visa program that limited where and how soon Afghans could be relocated. Later that month, Price pointed to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan and the need to protect Americans when asked about Afghans who were unable to get to Kabul for evacuation flights.
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As the Afghan government collapsed on Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken blamed the Trump administration when asked why the Biden administration waited until mid-July to launch an interagency task force to help evacuate Afghan allies.
“[It] has actually been in place for many, many weeks,” Blinken said. “And we have been working this from day one. We had to put in place an entire system to deal with this. Unfortunately, none of that work was done when we came in.”
By the time Biden spoke to the nation on Monday about the U.S. withdrawal, only a few thousand Afghans had been evacuated while upward of 80,000 or more applicants and their family members remained in Afghanistan, many stranded behind Taliban checkpoints and unable to get to the Kabul airport for evacuation flights.
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“I know that there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghans — civilians sooner,” Biden said. “Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier — still hopeful for their country. And part of it was because the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, ‘a crisis of confidence.’ ”
On Tuesday, the Pentagon said it planned to evacuate 5,000 to 9,000 people per day starting within the next 24 hours. More than 24 hours later, the Pentagon announced that it had evacuated roughly 2,000 people — including American citizens — over the past day and that it expected to evacuate a similar number on Thursday, 12 days before the Aug. 31 withdrawal deadline.