Of all of the enormous messes that President Joe Biden has managed to make over the course of his first month in office, perhaps none is quite as disastrous as his work in Afghanistan.
With the US occupation going on 20 years in the country, Biden, like many others, had gotten impatient. The President wanted to bring the troops home, which always sounds good on a bumper sticker.
The only problem was the multitude of advice from high-ranking military members telling him that this was an awful idea. Biden went ahead with it anyway, and the Taliban terror organization was able to completely overrun the entirety of Afghanistan in eleven days. They then unceremoniously kicked out American forces, which amounted to the abandonment of Americans in a nation ruled by folks that want them dead.
This week, nearly two months after the catastrophic withdrawal, the Pentaon is revealing the extent of the rescue mission ahead.
The Pentagon stated Tuesday that nearly 450 American citizens are still in Afghanistan following August’s U.S. military withdrawal, more than the Biden administration has previously claimed.
The latest tally came from Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl, after Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., pointed to what he believed were contradictory or at least “confusing” numbers that the administration has presented since the August 31 withdrawal.
“One of the many confusing things about this whole thing is that we really don’t know how many Americans are left in Afghanistan,” Inhofe said. “The administration’s number of U.S. citizens left in Afghanistan keeps changing. We all understand that. It’s very confusing.”
And he wasn’t wrong.
Inhofe noted that the Biden administration “always said 100 to 200 U.S. citizens left in Afghanistan,” but now says it “has already withdrawn 234 and is in contact with 363 others, 176 of whom want to leave,” citing numbers the State Department provided last week.
While there are certainly no lack of issues that are contributing to Joe Biden’s plummeting approval numbers, this Afghanistan debacle may very well be the most influential.
