'I cannot call this evacuation a success': Former State Department officer ... trends now
Joe Biden has famously called the 2021 U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan an 'extraordinary success,' but a former State Department official who was there is saying the president is plain wrong.
As hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians flooded the Hamid Karzai International Airport in August 2021, former State Department Foreign Service Officer Sam Aronson swapped out his pen and paper for flashbang grenades and night vision goggles.
His diplomatic tools were replaced by instruments of war, an indication, Aronson said, that the plan had gone horribly wrong.
'Let me be clear: I cannot call this evacuation a success,' he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee, according to a copy of his testimony obtained by DailyMail.com.
'More than 200 people were murdered or wounded, and thousands more, like me, struggle with invisible scars and moral injuries,' he said.
The U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan cost 13 American after a suicide bomber attacked a crowd attempting get int o the Hamid Karzai International Airport. The attack also killed over 150 Afghans
As the Taliban took over control of the country in 2021 U.S. military and diplomatic leaders began drafting plans to evacuate the country
Videos posted during the evacuation show swarms of people clamoring to get into the airport to leave aboard U.S. fights. Some posts even show Afghans desperately clinging to the exterior of U.S. military planes in hopes to be saved from Taliban rule. At least one of these individuals on the exterior of the plane later died after falling off
One of the most scarring situations of the saga, Aronson said, was the heartbreaking ultimatum he had to tell an Afghan mother.
'I remember giving a horrible choice to a young mother whose husband got stopped by the Taliban: Get on the plane and never see your husband again, or exit the airport and lose your only chance at freedom.'
'I live with memories of women and men walking through razor wire, slicing up their bodies, for a chance that I would allow them into the airport,' he continued.
He also recounted having to hotwire buses to get transportation because no U.S. officials had access to vehicles upon landing at the airport.
'The issue was that the vehicles you had one morning were likely not the vehicles you had later that day, because there was a finite number of vehicles and we were all -- or many elements of the response had to steal vehicles from one another.'
The operation had tragic consequences for the Afghans and for U.S. personnel.
Aronson said when he returned to the U.S. after the operation he was in physical pain from the harsh conditions at the airport.
And despite a pledge from Secretary of State Antony Blinken that employees would not be penalized for seeking therapy and
