Former President Donald Trump’s attempt “to starve refugee programs” of needed resources contributed to the abandonment of thousands of Afghan nationals who worked for the United States, according to a prominent State Department official.
“We prioritized this program, a program that had been left in an unfortunately decrepit state by the previous administration,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters. “So this was a program that, literally from the start, we prioritized. We took from a state of decrepitude and turned into a program that was operating much more efficiently.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team acknowledged that “the majority” of Afghan nationals eligible, by virtue of their work for the U.S. government, for a Special Issuance Visa to the U.S. were left behind. State Department accounts of the complexity of the evacuation effort have failed to allay the frustrations of administration critics, including among the private-sector charities connected to the evacuation effort.
“The U.S. has planned to withdraw from Afghanistan for quite some time,” Jewish Family Services of Seattle’s Cordelia Revells, who runs the nonprofit group’s refugee portfolio, told the Washington Examiner. “This should have been built into the withdrawal plans.”
Price cited a State Department watchdog report from 2020 that found “a major bottleneck” in the vetting of SIV applications, resulting in the short-staffed program taking so long to process the claims that refugee advocates filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the Afghan nationals.
“And you can see the efficiencies that we were able to achieve,” Price added. “In March of this year, we were processing about 100 SIV applications per week. By mid-August of this year, we were processing a thousand SIV applications per week.”
Yet, President Joe Biden’s announcement that he would withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan came in April, far closer to the beginning of that effort to streamline the SIV program than the end.
“These were folks who supported our mission in Afghanistan throughout our time there,” Revells observed. “And this phase of evacuation should have been planned for. It should not have been left to that final 10-day scramble.”
Biden stipulated that U.S. troops would leave by Sept. 11, but Pentagon officials privately raced to exit even sooner than that in the hopes that unexpected speed would minimize the vulnerability of the withdrawing forces.
“When we still had a chance, I asked this administration, go back on offense, reset the chessboard … regain our leverage,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican and former Navy SEAL who was wounded in Afghanistan, told reporters earlier this week. “They said, no. They wanted to stick to their arbitrary surrender deadline, and they left.”
As they left, Taliban forces swept across the country, confounding Biden’s predictions that the Afghan military and police forces would withstand their offensive.
“We were able to shave more than a year off the average processing time,” Price insisted. “If we had the time that just about everyone expected, you can see how those gains would [have been] quite valuable. Those gains will be quite valuable, though, because many of them are still relevant to the ongoing SIV processing.”
