History's Greatest Airlift Revisited
Biden's Afghanistan skedaddle looks even more disgraceful in the rearview mirror
Earlier this week, the House Foreign Relations Committee held its first hearing on the Biden Administration’s conduct of the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. This would never have happened if the GOP had failed to gain control of the House of Representatives last November, because the President and his party wouldn’t have wanted to hear testimony like this:
I opened my eyes to Marines dead or unconscious around me. A crowd of hundreds immediately vanished in front of me and my body was catastrophically wounded with 100-150 ball bearings now in it. Almost immediately we started taking fire from the neighborhood and I saw how injured I was with my right arm completely shredded and unusable.
I saw my whole lower abdomen soaked in blood. I crawled backwards seven feet because I thought I was still in harm's way.
My body was overwhelmed from the trauma of the blast. My abdomen had been ripped open. Every inch of my exposed body except for my face took ball bearings and shrapnel.
I tried to get up, but could not. Laying there for a few minutes, I started to lose consciousness, when I heard Chas, my team leader, screaming my name as he ran to me.
That was Marine Sergeant Tyler Vargas-Andrews, who lost an arm and a leg in the suicide bombing at Kabul Airport on 26 August 2021 that took the lives of eleven Marines, a Navy medic, an Army soldier, and some 170 Afghan civilians. Sergeant Vargas-Andrews was one of the thirty-two Americans wounded by the blast. Since that day he has undergone forty-four surgeries.
As if his personal chronicle of terror and pain was not bad enough, this young man also testified that the bombing may well have been prevented. Hours before it happened, a suspected suicide bomber had been spotted and tagged as a threat by the Marine sniper team to which Sergeant Vargas-Andrews was assigned. The team leader requested permission to take the shot. The response: “Leadership did not have the engagement authority for us. Do not engage.”
To this day, Sergeant Vargas-Andrews believes that the suspect his team tagged carried out the suicide bombing.
His emotional testimony was seconded by that of the other veterans who were there with him on Wednesday. They all described President Biden’s “greatest airlift in history” as a chaotic, disgraceful bug-out— a debacle for which no one, from the Commander-in-Chief on down the chain of command, was ever held accountable. A supposedly in-depth investigation by CENTCOM, the responsible military headquarters, claimed that the suicide bombing “was not preventable at the tactical level without degrading the mission to maximize the number of evacuees” and “was not the result of any act of omission or commission by forces on the ground.”
I know of at least one Marine who begs to differ.
Biden’s Afghanistan skedaddle stranded hundreds of American citizens and abandoned tens of thousands of Afghans who, having worked closely with US forces over the years, were marked for death by the Taliban. Nor is that all. Since the Taliban returned to power, they have been systematically reimposing their Islamofascist enslavement of the women of Afghanistan, for whom the American invasion and occupation constituted a genuine liberation. Incidentally, you see no American feminists wearing Handmaid’s Tale costumes on behalf of those women.
Besides the service members who were at Kabul Airport that day, many thousands of men and women who’d served earlier in Afghanistan watched with anger and disgust as the catastrophe unfolded. One of them was my own daughter Alex, an Army veteran who served in Afghanistan as an MP in 2010-11. That was a rough year for my daughter, her mother, and me. Fortunately, Alex came through it physically unscathed. But the experience changed her, as such experiences change every veteran. Most of them suck it up and get on with their lives. Some do not. And the lesson, courtesy of our despicable president and his craven minions, that their service and sacrifices were all for nothing, cannot be helpful to those who bear the Afghanistan War’s most painful physical and emotional wounds.
Joe Biden and the Democratic Party would prefer to shove this shameful and infuriating bit of American history down the memory hole. Watch Sergeant Tyler Vargas-Andrews’ testimony and you’ll understand why.