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As the Taliban fighters were closing in on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, American diplomats stared at a pile of passports they had collected from Afghan allies who had assisted the war effort and were seeking a special visa to get them out of harm’s way.
The U.S. officials decided to burn the documents rather than let them fall into Taliban hands.
That, however, meant Afghans who had devoted years to helping America suddenly could no longer prove who they were as they rushed for the Kabul airport to try to catch one of the U.S. evacuation flights out of the country.
The State Department devised a solution. It emailed “electronic visas” to a list of addresses for Afghan allies. This became known as the “hall pass,” and it was supposed to get those Afghan allies through the U.S. checkpoints at the airport and onto a plane to safety.
Kabul residents quickly figured out the document was easy to duplicate, and forged copies rapidly found their way into the hands of folks who had no connection to the U.S. war effort, were not eligible for the Special Immigrant Visa, and had not earned the right to be evacuated.
SEE ALSO: House GOP highlights administration failings in report on botched Afghanistan withdrawal
“It was a matter of filling airplanes,” Michael Adler, acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Afghanistan, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee. On Monday, the committee published its account of the evacuation chaos and broader failures of President Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal.
Committee Chairman Michael McCaul’s report said that while Mr. Biden and his team portrayed confidence when announcing Operation Allies Refuge in July 2021, they didn’t have a plan for evacuating people or where to send them.
Indeed, they weren’t even sure whom they wanted to evacuate.
Several officials told the committee that the guidance changed daily — one testified that it even changed twice in one day at some point — and officers on the ground were left to their own judgments about whom to refuse and whom to admit to the airport, the last section of ground under U.S. control from Aug. 15 to Aug. 31.
The result was that more than 90% of Afghans who likely were eligible for the special visa were left behind when the U.S. completed its withdrawal.
Roughly 1,000 American citizens were also left behind in the country, or far more than the government was suggesting publicly, the House report said.
The audit is the most detailed accounting to date of failures of planning and execution as the Afghan government collapsed, the Taliban took over, and the U.S. attempted the chaotic airlift of tens of thousands of people.
The report blamed Mr. Biden and his senior leaders for failing to understand the Taliban’s threat, pursuing the final withdrawal despite warning signs and being slow to ramp up assistance to Americans and Afghan allies trying desperately to flee.
In particular, the report said the Biden team ignored warnings about security risks leading up to the bombing at the Kabul airport that killed 13 American troops and 170 Afghans and wounded many more Americans and Afghans.
“This report paints an incriminating picture of an administration concerned with optics and public perception rather than accountability and the safety of American personnel,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican.
Democrats said the report was one-sided.
“The American people, our service members, and our Afghan partners deserve answers to the months leading up to the withdrawal and the years of decision-making preceding it, and the Republicans’ report failed to deliver,” said Rep. Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat who said as a former Army Ranger in Afghanistan the withdrawal was “personal” to him.
Republicans had made the deaths of the 13 troops a centerpiece of former President Donald Trump’s campaign against Mr. Biden. Mr. Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race has lessened the impact of that attack, though Republicans argue that the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, bears some of the blame.
The next president also will have to confront the reality of thousands of Afghan allies still left behind.
The special visa program has existed for more than a decade, and Congress has increased the visa cap over the years.
As the U.S. withdrawal date neared, American officials realized they needed to prepare for a surge of people who assisted in the war effort and who faced the danger of Taliban retaliation. Processing, which had slowed during the initial months of the pandemic in 2020, was ordered to ramp up.
It took time to add employees to the program, and processing actually dropped in June and July of 2021 as a new COVID surge slowed down the required in-person interviews.
The State Department rushed to create a new refugee priority designation to help people stuck in the SIV backlog, but even that was problematic because applicants had to be living outside Afghanistan and in a third country. Those still stuck inside Afghanistan were in limbo.
Part of the problem was the State Department never had an estimate of how many people deserved to be evacuated. It couldn’t even settle on a definition of what constituted someone “at risk” of Taliban retaliation.
John Bass, former ambassador to Afghanistan and undersecretary of state for management, said the definition on the ground changed “day to day, sometimes hour to hour.”
Jim Dehart, who was assistant chief of mission in Afghanistan in 2018 and 2019 and later a senior official in the SIV program, said that meant officers would turn away someone only to realize that they would have been allowed under guidance issued later that day. Alternatively, they admitted someone who should have been blocked under the updated guidance.
“On a human level, that’s quite frustrating, but … it was required because of the circumstances and that we were dealing with in the dynamic situation, that the circumstances were constantly changing,” he told the committee.
After the White House issued an order on Aug. 18 to “fill all planes,” people started being evacuated who shouldn’t have been, Mr. Evans said.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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