Former President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan four years ago was a grave national humiliation that betrayed the men and women of our armed forces — particularly those who courageously served in the war-torn country for nearly two decades.
Unfortunately, the costs of this self-inflicted tragedy have continued long after our troops left Afghanistan. Recently, an Afghan national in Texas — who came to America during the Biden administration — was charged with issuing threats to build a bomb, launch a suicide attack, and murder Americans and “infidels.”
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In addition to this incident, the heinous attack against two members of the West Virginia National Guard in Washington, D.C., revealed that, sadly, the consequences of this rushed, reckless and ill-planned departure continue to put the security of our homeland and the safety of Americans at risk.
First, let me offer my prayers and support to the families, loved ones and fellow troops of U.S. Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom and U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, and prayers for Staff Sgt. Wolfe’s continued recovery. The honor they brought upon our country and their home state of West Virginia will not be forgotten.
Yet this tragedy — which allegedly occurred at the hands of an improperly vetted Afghan national who came to America in the chaos of the withdrawal — was entirely preventable.
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President Donald Trump foresaw this during his first term in office.
“The consequences of a rapid exit are both predictable and unacceptable,” Trump said during remarks presenting his strategy for Afghanistan on August 21, 2017.
He continued, “As we know, in 2011, America hastily and mistakenly withdrew from Iraq. As a result, our hard-won gains slipped back into the hands of terrorist enemies. Our soldiers watched as cities they had fought for, and bled to liberate, and won, were occupied by a terrorist group called ISIS. The vacuum we created by leaving too soon gave safe haven for ISIS to spread, to grow, recruit, and launch attacks. We cannot repeat in Afghanistan the mistake our leaders made in Iraq.”
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Unfortunately, because of Biden, we repeated the mistakes of Iraq. Yet this time around, the Biden administration added another self-imposed challenge by failing to vet the more than 190,000 Afghan nationals who have resettled in America since the withdrawal.
Let’s get something clear: the standard used to vet Afghan nationals to work with the CIA and our military in Afghanistan is entirely different from the standard of vetting that needs to be used when allowing Afghan nationals to come to America to live in our communities.
This is why I have called for stricter vetting standards and fought against blanket citizenship for unvetted Afghan nationals since the beginning of the withdrawal catastrophe.
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As I wrote at the time, “There is no doubt that we can’t trust some of the people who made it on evacuation flights in the chaos. … Proper vetting takes months. Vetting during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan took place over hours, days or weeks; in some cases, it didn’t happen at all. This is an entirely inadequate and reckless way to screen people from a country with poor recordkeeping and a long history of extremism and terrorism.”
Thoroughly vetting someone from a country such as Afghanistan is an involved and challenging process. It’s not the same as calling up one of our allies to request records on a particular individual or even reaching out to a local police department for a background check on a potential job candidate. Complicating matters further, at the time in question, the Afghan government had collapsed and turned over control to the Taliban, a sworn enemy of the United States.
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In the months immediately following the withdrawal, more than 70,000 Afghans entered the United States without the necessary background checks, causing an ongoing national security threat within our borders that remains to this day.
Underscoring this point, a report by the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General in February 2022 found that the Biden administration failed to use an essential biometric database to vet Afghan evacuees properly. In a retroactive review conducted by the U.S. Army (which maintains the database), many of the evacuees were found to have “potentially significant security concerns,” including “individuals whose latent fingerprints have been found on improvised explosive devices,” as well as individuals who are “known or suspected terrorists.”
Without question, these evacuations were reckless rush jobs intended to paper over Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, ultimately creating a dangerous ticking time bomb within our borders.
The recent tragedy inflicted on innocent American servicemembers, as well as the arrest in Texas, should serve as an urgent wake-up call to get our house in order. This starts by making sure that everyone in our country is a law-abiding individual who wants to help keep America safe, strong, prosperous and free for themselves, their families and their fellow Americans.
