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Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews, a U.S. Marine Corps sniper, tells Congress that he was denied permission to shoot the suicide bomber in Afghanistan that killed 13 service members and over 170 civilians:
"Plain and simple, we were ignored. Our expertise was disregarded. pic.twitter.com/A8mxNlKFkS
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 8, 2023
“Plain and simple, we were ignored. Our expertise was disregarded, no one was held accountable for our safety,” he told the committee.
He also described the moments after the blast:
“I’m thrown 12 feet onto the ground but instantly knew what happened. I opened my eyes to Marines dead or unconscious and lying around,” he said through tears.
“A crowd of hundreds immediately vanished in front of me and my body was catastrophically wounded with 100 to 150 ball bearings now in it.”
Vargas-Andrews lost an arm and a leg, lost a kidney, and has endured 44 surgeries. //
Vargas-Andrews also said that Joe Biden tried to shake his hand, although he had lost his arm, then started talking about his son.
These are the people to whom Kirby is saying, "Oh, hey, nothing we could have done," when he offers such a shameful response.
Marine and Department of Defense contractor with eight deployments to Afghanistan as part of a Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) Task Force, says the administration lied to the American public when they said that Americans were able to evacuate after the Afghanistan debacle, reports Just the News.
During an appearance on the Wednesday edition of the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show, Robichaux said there are still American who want to escape the Taliban-ruled country:
H.R. 5305, the Extending Government Funding and Delivering Emergency Assistance Act , requires that the DHS secretary submit a written report 60 days after the enacted date that breaks down how many Afghans are in the country. The breakdown must include how many evacuees are at U.S. overseas bases or nonmilitary holding areas abroad, as well as the number of lawful permanent residents, SIV holders, SIV applicants, nonimmigrant visa holders, and refugee referrals.
The Biden team blew all that off. So one has to ask: why? They have lied from the outset about the people that they evacuated, and they continue to try to obscure the nature of the people they evacuated.
According to reports, Biden himself ordered them to evacuate “Afghans at risk” and “Families with women and children” — people who didn’t even have to have helped the U.S. or who hadn’t been previously vetted — to fill up the planes. The Congressional requirement would make them have to explain all that and how many were security concerns.
"The gap was here," he says, holding his hands up between the frames. "The next ambassador was 2002 after the removal of the Taliban from power."
The gap is just a few inches of beige wall, but it represents 20 years of chaos, civil war and brutal totalitarian control. During those 20 years, this building was closed and shuttered. State Department officials say the U.S. holds embassies in trust until new governments are recognized. Not too far from here, the Iranian embassy has been frozen in such a state for more than 40 years now. //
Nejrabi says he and the other diplomats will stay as long as they possibly can. Then they will turn out the lights and hope it won't be another 20 years before someone turns them back on.
At the very beginning of the war, many thinkers, myself included, expressed reservations about entering Afghanistan, also known as “The Graveyard of Empires,” because many of us did not believe that a young culture like America had the wisdom to take on a task that would take at least a century to do properly. But we went anyway. Twenty years on, we have played out our initial hand of cards in the first round of a global poker game. We lost. The question is, “What did we learn from it?”
There are eighty years left in the timeline of what we began. We could repeat the mistake of the past. We could start the cycle of death over again, as has been done many times before; not just by us, but by everyone else that’s tried. Or we could find a better way. War didn’t work. It almost never does. Enduring legacies require finding that long path to peace and tranquility. Not an easy thing to do. But not something we haven’t done. //
Today, the conflict isn’t colonial, it’s cultural. Both inside our nation and beyond our borders, the battle between tolerance and fanaticism rages. We’ve learned a hard lesson that money and might don’t work to solve it.
That’s the lesson for America from Afghanistan.
One veteran who served in the first Gulf War and in Afghanistan, and who participated in that 2008 rescue with Mohammed spoke exclusively to RedState about the withdrawal, about that “rescue” in February 2008, and about Mohammed, who we now know as Aman Khalili. Though his experiences were more than a decade ago, he was still emotional as he shared them with me. It’s important to hear these stories of individuals translators, knowing that there are thousands of men like him who believed in what America stood for and were willing, just like the men and women of our Armed Forces, to die for it.
The veteran still has family members on active duty, so we are honoring his request that his name not be used in this piece:
“In leaving both Americans and Afghans who helped us, like Mohammed, behind, Biden and the guys in charge went against over 200 years of military mindset and honor. We don’t leave anyone behind. If you look throughout Marine Corps and Army history you’ll find where four or five soldiers or Marines died to save one. We promised the interpreters we would protect them. We have to keep those promises, because if they don’t have confidence that they won’t be left behind, how do you get a guy to stay in a war zone?
“And, we knew that the Afghan Army wouldn’t stand once we left. If it takes 40 years to get from a lieutenant to a general, why could we think we could build their army in 20 years? And knowing that it wouldn’t stand, how could we leave without a plan to get everyone out?
“In Afghanistan, every interpreter was afraid for their life. Even back in 2008, they were whacking interpreters. So for him to be an interpreter, it’s like you’re putting yourself out there on Main Street for everybody to see you. Interpreters very seldom left that gate without their faces being covered. Even in 2007-2008, we knew that the guys in the Afghan Army and the Afghan police might turn on you. You only wanted to take an interpreter you could trust when you went outside the wire.
“Mohammed was a trusted interpreter. As a young guy he’d been a fighter against the Russians, so he had a vested interest in Afghanistan’s future. We knew all of the interpreters and their reputations, and one reason we took Mohammed with us that night was the fact that we knew he wouldn’t turn on us.
“For example, interpreters weren’t allowed to carry a weapon. But, a couple of times it was really ugly and I took my pistol off and gave it to him. One of those times we were working with the 7th Group to get an HVT, high-value target. We were the outer cordon for the mission. For special operations units, their biggest fear is being surrounded once they’re on a target, so our goal was to set up a blocking force, to go down the road and make sure nobody comes up. They told us, ‘No matter what, don’t stop.’ Well, the truck behind us ran off the road but we never stopped. We had to get that roadblock up down there. We threw up the roadblock, but now the trucks we’re supposed to have with us weren’t with us anymore. This is one of the first times that we were truly operating in the real world at night. I took out my pistol and gave it to him. I told him, ‘You get stupid and I’ll shoot you.’ Of course, he didn’t [get stupid].
“On the night of the rescue, the 82nd Airborne controlled the AO or the area of operations. The unit I was with was the QRF, or quick reaction force, for the Bagram zone. The QRF got a call that a helicopter with a VIP has had to make an emergency landing in the mountains in an area that’s known as Afghanistan’s equivalent to the Ho Chi Minh trail, a big area where weapons, ammunition, and the Taliban flowed through. We knew the Taliban would find out they were there in no time, so the race was on to see who would get to them first. //
“So, we loaded up into our pre-staged vehicles and grabbed a few interpreters, including Mohammed, and then two or three up-armored Toyotas joined us. I didn’t know who they were, but I knew that those Toyotas would bring the VIPs down.
“I’ve seen some questioning why Special Forces or Delta or SEALs and those guys weren’t called in for such high-level VIPs. Well, that’s because it wasn’t in their area of operation. It was the 82nd Airborne’s AO, and they already had a QRF in place.
“It was snowing when we left Bagram, and we were probably looking at a 20, 25-mile trip one way. We were probably at 7000 feet and going up to about 10 or 11,000 feet. As we went up into the mountains, the snow started getting deeper, to the point where the snow was knee and thigh deep. Bill McClain, the squad leader, was in the lead vehicle and was the true hero of that part of the mission. It started snowing so hard that it got to the point where you couldn’t see the road anymore. Stopping wasn’t an option, but on this road driving off the road was driving off of a cliff. At the edge of the road, it went straight down. McClain is a guy who could find his way blind; somehow he just knew where he was going. So he started to walk the trucks up, walking alongside us so we wouldn’t drive off the road. //
“We got up the hill and after securing the area and making sure the VIPs were going to be safe, we got them loaded up in the up-armored Toyotas to get to them to the base. A piece of the platoon escorted the up-armored Toyotas and the VIPs off the hill, and the rest of the platoon stayed up with the helicopters for three days until the weather cleared and the pilots could get the helicopter. //
To show you how little Kerry knew about how things work, when we’d laid out the chains to put on the tires to make the trip down the hill, he kicked them out of the way as he walked by. So we had to lay them back out again. //
“The military doesn’t care that the military left. What the military cares about is leaving people behind. It’s not in the military’s nature. The Woke generals have violated an oath that’s been in place for nearly 200 years. That’s why many veterans are coming apart, because how do you square this with our military tradition? You can’t. In my opinion, Biden made a deal with the Taliban to get out. But why?
“For those involved in the withdrawal, it had to have been heart-wrenching to know that you’re leaving your people behind because it goes against everything we’ve been taught.”
During his testimony before the House today, CENTCOM head Gen. Frank McKenzie confirmed something that we reported last month – that during a meeting that McKenzie had with the Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar, he was offered the full control of Kabul while evacuation operations were completed.
It was an astonishing report revealed last month – that they had the opportunity to provide a safe withdrawal with the whole city being a buffer around the airport, offered by the Taliban – but turned it down instead opting for the unsafe, completely endangered and at-risk situation they ended up with, at the mercy of the Taliban. It’s likely why U.S. service members and Afghans were killed in the suicide attack. //
Another thing to note was that McKenzie’s meeting with the Taliban came on August 15, the same day the city of Kabul fell. NBC has reported that the day before, McKenzie had warned Baradar that the Taliban shouldn’t come within 20 to 30 kilometers of the city or they would be hit by airstrikes. But then the Taliban took over the city and there were no airstrikes. “The next day, Taliban fighters rolled into Kabul, and no U.S. warplanes bombed the insurgents, the three senior defense officials said,” NBC News said.
Great job there, Biden Administration. They’ll surely take you seriously when you don’t even follow through on a threat like that. But that was essentially the problem with the whole withdrawal – the Biden Administration let the Taliban dictate to them throughout and it cost Americans and Afghan allies their lives.
Dem Senator's Assessment of Biden Admin's Senate Testimony Is Searing: 'No One in Charge' – RedState
We covered how Gen. McKenzie’s testimony nailed Joe Biden for a lie. McKenzie testified under oath that he had previously recommended to Biden that we keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan prior to his decision not to do so. McKenzie also said he predicted that withdrawing them would cause the Afghan Army to collapse and the Taliban to take over. Biden said he hadn’t been told either thing by any of his advisors.
Gen. Milley revealed the astounding news that after Kabul fell on August 15, Biden didn’t even talk with Milley and Austin about the question of possibly extending the August 31 deadline until August 25. So what did he do for 10 days besides being on vacation?
Milley also blew up Biden’s claim that he had to stick to the Trump deal. He said that Biden wasn’t obligated to carry through on any deal with the Taliban and do a hasty withdrawal because the Trump deal was a conditioned deal and the Taliban didn’t hold to the conditions. Trump wasn’t doing just a naked withdrawal like Biden, he was holding the Taliban to certain requirements. But Biden went through with it anyway despite the fact that the Taliban didn’t hold to the deal. That’s all on Biden, so he can’t blame Trump for that choice. Finally, Milley blew up the Biden claim that somehow we had achieved the purpose of not being threatened from Afghanistan again. Milley made it very clear that we were likely to be hearing from ISIS and/or al Qaeda within 12-36 months because of the way the situation was left in Afghanistan. //
But maybe no Democrat lit up the Biden team for their failures more than Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT). //
He seems to have been personally touched and outraged by how Americans and our Afghan allies were stranded by Biden. He was involved in trying to help get stranded citizens out of Afghanistan and faced all kinds of roadblocks from the Biden team in the effort. He also focused on what should be for everyone the most important thing at this point — helping extract the people still stranded.
Blumenthal’s assessment today of the Biden administration was searing. There was “no one in charge” he said.
The Post Millennial
@TPostMillennial
Sen. Blumenthal on Americans stranded in Afghanistan: "We don't have an estimate on the number, because nobody is in charge right now."
11:39 AM · Sep 28, 2021
Townhall.com
@townhallcom
CONGRESSMAN SCOTT PERRY: "Can you tell us where you are today?"
BLINKEN: "Yes. I'm at the State Department."
PERRY: "Couldn't be bothered to come down here and see Congress? Alright, that's great."
House Republicans
@HouseGOP
Secretary Blinken just admitted that the Taliban has blocked American charter flights out of Afghanistan.
This is a hostage situation. //
Blinken refused to answer questions about the reported call between Joe Biden and former Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani, where Biden allegedly told Ghani that whether it was true or false, he had to tell the public that they were beating back the Taliban — basically lying and deceiving the public. //
Then Rep. Scott Perry really got down to it with Blinken, asking him some great questions. Did the State Department block any Americans from being evacuated? Blinken claimed not, despite many reports to the contrary. How many Afghans did they evacuate who weren’t SIVs (in other words, how many were evacuated, not because they helped the U.S. but to bump up the numbers and were just refugees, not the people the State Department was supposed to be concentrating on getting out)? //
Curtis Houck
@CurtisHouck
Replying to @CurtisHouck
Annnd here's what some will argue was a big takeaway...
.@RepScottPerry: "How long was your recent interview with the FBI and was it a deposition?
Sec. Blinken: "I'm sorry. I don't know what you're referring."
Blinken goes on by refusing to comment further (3/3)
Why?
What does the Biden administration gain from preventing American civilians and Afghan allies from being rescued by people like Montalvo and Mills? The answer lies in the nature of the entities responsible for extricating these individuals.
The fact of the matter is that these private individuals and organizations working to remove American civilians from danger are only doing so because Biden failed to evacuate them. If the president had done his job properly, there would be no need for private rescue efforts. It is yet another indicator that President Joe Biden has failed to handle this situation effectively.
Moreover, it is important to point out that if and when these private entities can finally get these individuals out of Afghanistan, it will represent quite an embarrassment for the White House. It is a humiliation that Biden’s team would rather avoid if possible.
However, the State Department’s stall tactics cannot work forever. The longer these people remain trapped in Kabul, the more danger they could face.
Mills and his rescue team tried to get her out first through the Kabul airport, but the Taliban turned her back. They then considered the Mazar-i-Sharif route but then the planes weren’t cleared. So Mills and his team got her out through an overland route, through multiple attempts and sleight of hand like a “shell game” he said, just before the Taliban closed the checkpoint they went through.
The State Department’s ultimate role? They helped get them tourist visas after they had already gotten out across the border into another country. Big help. Both Rep. Markwayne Mullin and Rep. Ronny Jackson said the State Department’s claims were false, Mullin calling it a “flat out lie.”
So after creating this mess and putting people in this position, how offensive is this that they try to also steal claim for things they didn’t even do? These people have no shame.
(CNN)US officials processing Afghan refugees abroad recently alerted the State Department to instances in which women and girls were forced into marriage or arrived with male partners posing as their husbands to be eligible for evacuation and escape the Taliban, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
The incidents described by sources to CNN were revealed while Afghans were at a transit hub abroad. They underscore the desperation among Afghans to flee the country after the Taliban takeover -- and the fear of what their rule might mean for women and girls.
It's unclear how widespread the issue is, but it prompted enough concern for US diplomats in the United Arab Emirates to send a cable.
‘Whether it is true or not,’ this president and his enablers ‘need to project a different picture’: that the Afghanistan retreat was a great success. //
In a bombshell report on Aug. 31, Reuters reported on an audio recording of a July 23 call between Biden and then-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. It released a transcript. In the call, Biden stated, “I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things aren’t going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban.”
Biden then gave Ghani his marching orders: “And there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.” His own words condemn the president: “Whether it is true or not…” As the indispensable Mollie Hemingway noted on Fox News on Sept. 2, “What this phone call shows is that the withdrawal was, like so many other parts of the war, communicated to the American public with lies.” Indeed it was.
But this was even worse. Again, Hemingway: “While the previous president was impeached over a phone call and accused of a quid pro quo, here you actually have a president asking someone to lie on his behalf and conditioning military aid on part of those lies.” //
The abandonment of Americans and allies who fought with us, coupled with the lies about the strategy, is a disaster. It is contrary to the military’s fundamental ethos and everything that this country stands for. It compromises both our national honor and security.
But, “whether it is true or not,” this president and his enablers “need to project a different picture”: that the evacuation and retreat was a great success, that it all went according to plan, and that this administration will continue protect our fellow citizens both in Afghanistan and at home. For shame, Mr. President, for shame.
a new report from CNN of all places has revealed that the evacuation devolved into a sex slavery market as women entered into forced marriages in exchange for the promise of rescue.
Omri Ceren
@omriceren
Thinly sourced but CNN says there's cable on it. If true should be mass resignations.
Biden admin didn't have criteria & didn't vet 10s of 1000s of Afghans they evac'd. What resulted was market for forced child marriage & sex slavery across evac process.
The sources said that some Afghan women and girls housed at one of the evacuation centers in the UAE reported that their families had forced them into marriage outside of the airport in Kabul so they could escape the country as the Taliban seized power. In some reported instances, families paid men eligible for evacuation thousands of dollars to marry or pose as husbands for women to flee. //
Ceren points out, this is also evidence that the vetting process was an absolute joke. Men were literally able to take payment for women being forced into sex slavery within hours of being evacuated and no one checking the paperwork seemed to care. That means they either turned a blind eye or that they weren’t even actually checking the backgrounds of these people to even notice what was going on.
None of this is surprising, though. We saw the country of Libya descend into a literal modern-day slave state after the Obama administration orchestrated the overthrow of Muammar Ghaddafi. Unintended consequences are a constant when it comes to Washington’s foreign policy smart-set, though, that’s not an excuse for what occurred.
But he also just kept saying things that made no sense or that were demonstrably untrue.
Biden says he was warning people to get out since March or April. But then he was also saying that he himself couldn’t see the country falling, that “no one” could, so he can’t be blamed for not seeing it. So which is it? In July, of course, he claimed that he hadn’t been told the country might fall. That was a lie, as we found out later, as he was told in June that it was a possibility. We’ve been talking about the possibility since at least May.
He spoke about the Trump May 1 deadline – yelling that the choice was between that and surging far more troops in for more war which no one was talking about. But he himself broke that deadline in April, postponing leaving for four months. So he himself proved that was nonsense. Plus, Trump had a lot of conditions in the deal that the Taliban broke, but Biden didn’t hold them to the deal, which would have kept them in check. //
He says he disagrees with people who say he should have started sooner. Now, leave aside for the moment that his people were telling us in July they were working on getting interpreters out. So they were claiming in July that they were doing what he says now they couldn’t. But he says now – imagine if they brought in thousands of troops to get out people then, in the middle of a civil war? I don’t know Joe, was it better to bring in the thousands after you pulled out all the troops after they took complete control and we were at their mercy because of you?
But the whole point of doing it earlier was so that you didn’t have to do it all at once, so that you could have done it over months, slowly and carefully, fully vetting everyone. So you wouldn’t need “thousands of troops.” Plus, Biden pulled the remaining 2500 troops out, only to have to put 6000 back in. So he himself was “surging” in far more troops than he took out. Everything he claimed he was doing to reduce our involvement, only increased the risk and danger to our people and our Afghan allies. //
It was, to Joe Biden, about proving Joe Biden right about this issue.
There were a lot of sick things in it, but the thing that was sociopathic about it all was using his own dead son’s name/death for emotional blackmail. Some people may not like that I say that, but that’s what it is. He’s done that repeatedly in his rants on Afghanistan. He did it again in Tuesday’s speech, and he did it during his Dover meetings with the families who lost their sons and daughters in Kabul. So, for the record, Joe Biden’s son Beau didn’t die in Afghanistan. He died of cancer. He had previously served in Iraq. The families felt he talked more about his own son than theirs. We see him throw Beau Biden again into this speech. He acts like he was a Gold Star father, and it’s not the same thing. The families know that and they were offended that he made it about himself and not about their loved ones.
But more than that, it’s a cynical use of his son as a defense to being criticized, to make it not about facts, but about his pain, not even about the son. To me, that’s sick and even disrespectful to his own son, to use Beau’s death in that way.
According to NBC News, around 20,000 Afghans who had worked with the US government had applied for SIVs, and that was back in May. No doubt the number skyrocketed as it became clear the Taliban would prevail. When you add in their families, that number jumps to almost 75,000. In the end, we got out around 8,500, a tiny fraction of those we made promises to.
Putting aside whether one agrees with bringing SIVs here or not, the issue here is just how pervasive the misleading claims by Biden and his cohorts have been following the end of operations in Afghanistan. They’ve continually presented a rosy picture that is clearly not true. This airlift not only failed to get all Americans out, it overwhelmingly failed to get Afghan allies out as well. That’s not the reality the administration is admitting to when they trot out Austin to blow smoke up the collective backside of the nation.
What we are seeing right now is an administration that is flailing, desperate to cover up its incompetence. This airlift was not a roaring success. Rather, it was a rushed, ill-planned, chaotic retreat that left tens of thousands of people who deserved to get out to the tender mercies of the Taliban.
That leaves one big question remaining: Who exactly did we evacuate?
The War in Afghanistan has always been a black box, but the Biden administration just made matters worse.
According to an admission obtained from the State Department, Biden officials recently directed federal agencies to scrub their websites of official reports detailing the $82.9 billion in military equipment and training provided to the Afghan security forces since 2001. //
The scrubbed audits and reports included detailed accounting of what the U.S. had provided to Afghan forces, down to the number of night vision devices, hand grenades, Black Hawk helicopters, and armored vehicles.
Reports further quantified 208 aircraft and helicopters; 75,000 war vehicles – including 22 Humvees, 50,000 tactical vehicles and nearly 1,000 mine resistant vehicles; and 600,000 weapons – including 350,000 M4 and M16 rifles, 60,000 machine guns, and 25,000 grenade launchers. The//
Again, to reiterate, these reports do not include recipient information, and the Taliban already likely controls the war chest in question.
This directive doesn’t seem to be designed to protect our Afghan allies—or, if it is, it’s been poorly executed. One U.S. entity that we will not name has failed to remove a report detailing the Afghan forces by rank. That report, one could argue, could be used as a tally sheet for retribution, but it’s still publicly available. //
Again, to reiterate, these reports do not include recipient information, and the Taliban already likely controls the war chest in question.
As reported by Just the News, a series of desperate text messages between U.S. military commanders and private citizens mounting last-minute rescues tell a far different story than that presented by the Biden administration. “We are f*cking abandoning American citizens,” wrote an Army colonel, detailing how frantic, pleading Americans —waving U.S. passports — were rejected at the Kabul airport, as three empty rescue flights waited nearby, hours before the last American troops left Afghanistan.
six in ten people said the country has “seriously gone off on the wrong track.” That’s a horrible indicator for Biden.
On top of that, the latest Rasmussen numbers found that 52% want Biden to resign over the disaster of the Afghanistan withdrawal, while 39% disagree. But that wasn’t all.
An even bigger number agreed with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) that Biden deserved to be impeached. 60% agreed with Graham’s statement that Biden should be impeached, with 37% saying no, according to Newsmax. //
Ldeer1960
3 hours ago
"...there’s been a lot of honest reporting and a lot of truth..." for certain values of "a lot", "honest", and "truth". If the actual truth were told accurately and across all media there would be a lynch mob around the White House, Congress and the Pentagon.
it surely sounded a lot like he said they would get money if people — Americans and Afghan allies — who were still trapped in Afghanistan were allowed to leave. Sounds like a slow-moving hostage deal and did we just hear the bribe?
So, let’s see. We left our folks there and allies who needed to get out. We left the Taliban billions of dollars’ worth of equipment through the Afghan army, which they can now use for terrorism or to oppress the people. But now the Biden folks potentially want to funnel even more money to these characters that would keep them in power? The Taliban can hold them up for it, too, saying they have Americans. //
Joe Biden has put us in a box once again where we’re likely to see “pallets of cash” and negotiations with terrorists for hostages. Heck, Sullivan is saying they get money depending on whether they let people out — he’s literally saying it. Meanwhile, the Taliban are holding mock funerals for us in the country, parading around with a coffins draped in American flags. //
Rep. Mike Waltz
@michaelgwaltz
Trading economic assistance for safe passage home for Americans is de facto paying a ransom to terrorists.