OPINION:
A version of this story appeared in the daily Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Threat Status delivered directly to your inbox each weekday.
The Biden administration says as recently as an April 15 reinvestigation that the murders of 13 American service members at the Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate “was not preventable at the tactical level.”
The House Foreign Affairs Committee Republican majority, under Chairman Rep. Michael McCaul, has been investigating Abbey Gate and President Biden’s supposed coordinated exit plan, which turned into deadly chaos. The Republicans believe the Abbey Gate suicide bomber could have been prevented from coming near the airport.
Under pressure from Mr. McCaul, the Biden administration has for the first time provided the assassin’s identity. He was Abdul Rahman al-Logari, a member of the murderous ISIS-K. These are the terrorists who most recently carried out the March 22 concert massacre near Moscow and have left a trail of corpses across the Middle East.
Logari ended up in Afghanistan, but not by choice. A source familiar with his travels told me he was captured in India in 2017 while attempting a terror attack. The U.S. took custody of him and brought him to Afghanistan. There, he was moved from prison to prison until January 2021, when he ended up in the Parwan military detention center at Bagram, the strategically important air base run by American forces 30 miles from Kabul.
Three months later, on April 14, Mr. Biden announced a complete troop withdrawal. Commanders were under a zero-troop mandate.
On July 2, the Americans executed a slapdash middle-of-the-night evacuation of Bagram. The Afghan commander didn’t even know.
Left behind were Logari and a host of other ISIS-K prisoners who waited while the rampaging Taliban quickly consumed Bagram. On Aug. 15, 11 days before the Abbey Gate bombing, the Taliban released Logari and his dangerous colleagues, I’m told. They were essentially free to roam the country, establish links with ISIS-K’s Afghan chapter and hunt Americans.
Logari secured explosives to unleash a ball-bearing barrage that would kill 170 tightly packed Afghan civilians and the 13 Americans: 11 Marines, a soldier and a sailor. Growing numbers of desperate Afghans had crushed Hamid Karzai International Airport to catch an American flight to freedom. They had good reason to be afraid.
Intelligence reports said ISIS-K would attempt suicide bombings. Top American officers were relying on the Taliban, the same people who released Logari, to spot any ISIS-K infiltrators, a Central Command after-action report said.
The U.S. military was also coordinating with the Taliban to provide airport “crowd control” on Aug. 26, the report said. But Mr. McCaul’s committee revealed that the Taliban actually incited the chaos by executing people on the spot around the airport.
Committee Republicans reject the U.S. Central Command’s after-action report.
“The committee does not agree the Abbey Gate bombing was unavoidable,” a majority staff aide told me. “Logari wouldn’t have been able to attack Abbey Gate if President Biden hadn’t abandoned Bagram and allowed the Taliban to free the ISIS-K prisoners, including Logari from there. And all of this comes from the original sin, the president withdrawing all our troops while his administration privately knew the country would fall to the Taliban, and that any American left in the country could be targeted by ISIS-K terrorists.”
The Biden administration’s April 15 Abbey Gate update confirmed some witness accounts provided to Mr. McCaul’s committee.
Mr. McCaul said: “This report confirmed what witnesses have told this committee: the Taliban was executing civilians outside the airport. The executions caused mass chaos around the airport as large and desperate crowds of civilians sought to flee, creating a deadly operating environment for U.S. service members at the gates amid significant ISIS-K threats.
“The report also finally reveals the identity of the Abbey Gate bomber as Abdul Rahman al-Logari, an ISIS-K terrorist who was freed from the Bagram prison by the Taliban. With this report revealing the Biden administration has been sitting on critical information about what happened during the emergency evacuation from Afghanistan, it is clear there are many more questions to be answered.”
Military leaders said they had no choice but to abandon Bagram, given Mr. Biden’s order to remove all troops. Republicans say the command should have pushed back, given the air base’s pivotal role.
“Did you then and you’ve stated today, you didn’t advise Biden to pull everybody out. You advised him to stay,” Rep. Michael Waltz, a retired Green Beret colonel, said at a March 19 committee hearing.
The man at the witness table was retired Army Gen. Mark Milley, who as Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman was Mr. Biden’s top military adviser during the withdrawal.
Gen. Milley responded, “That’s correct.”
With the drawdown underway in July 2021, toward an Aug. 31 deadline, Mr. Biden told the nation, “The drawdown is proceeding in a secure and orderly way, prioritizing the safety of our troops as they depart.”
At that point, instead of praising himself, it would have been better for Mr. Biden to make a Trump-like blunt-speaking phone call to a Taliban leader to warn him against the release of any ISIS-K murderers until all Americans leave Afghanistan.
But Mr. Biden is a practiced appeaser. From the start, he dumped former President Donald Trump’s policies. He placated Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who rewarded him by invading Ukraine. He bowed to Iran’s terrorist mullahs, who rewarded him by reigniting their various proxy armies, i.e., Hamas. He restarted money for the Palestinian Authority, meaning more money for Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
On Jan. 19, 2022, Mr. Biden gave himself an A-plus for quitting Afghanistan and described the deaths of 13 American troops in stark terms.
“I have a great concern for the women and men who were blown up on the line at the airport by a terrorist attack against them,” he said.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.