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Flashback: VP Harris proud of being ‘last person in the room’ when Biden decided on Afghanistan withdrawal

July 27, 2024 | | Print Article

Now that Vice President Kamala Harris is running for president, it’s worth remembering that she took ownership of the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle three years ago.

Speaking on CNN that April, a few months before the disastrous conclusion to the withdrawal, she admitted to being the last person in the room when President Joe Biden decided to pursue the withdrawal.

“Were you the last person in the room?” CNN host Dana Bash asked her.

“Yes,” the vice president replied.

“And you feel comfortable [with that]?” Bash pressed.

“I do,” Harris replied.

Listen:

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In fairness, former President Donald Trump was the one who initiated the Afghanistan withdrawal. Before he was able to complete it, however, the American people voted Biden and Harris into office.

The problem was that, unlike Trump’s team, the Biden/Harris team was incompetent and many felt had no clue what it was doing. As a result, they wound up badly, badly, badly bungling the Afghanistan withdrawal.

But, as seen in the video above, Harris eagerly took ownership of it (months in advance, mind you), and that, critics say, speaks volumes (*Language warning):

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The withdrawal was such a mess that some U.S. citizens were forced to travel to Afghanistan to help save the lives of fellow Americans.

Take retired mixed martial artist, U.S. Army Sniper and Green Beret Tim Kennedy, who hopped a flight to Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of the withdrawal to help evacuate both trapped Americans and also Afghan allies who’d assisted U.S. forces during the Afghanistan War.

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“We had a very clear mission in who we were trying to identify and get out, and American citizens were number one,” he told Fox News in an interview at the time. “It was a landscape and a battlefield that was something that I had never experienced before and it was absolute mayhem.”

Especially when bombs were detonated at the airport in Kabul.

“I was on a full C-17 loading Afghans when the bomb went off. You can’t stop. You’re in an aircraft with 500 people’s lives right there. The aircrew were incredible and we were just focused on [completing the mission],” he said.

An intensely difficult mission.

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“The horrors of people getting to the airport is indescribable,” he said, noting how “dangerous it is to get them through the gates when there is hundreds of thousands of people trying to push their way through.”

He added that he saw things you “wouldn’t want to happen in your worst nightmare,” including flash bangs, “bullets going off,” “people being beaten and trampled to death” and — horrifyingly — “babies hanging in concertina wire.”

He also slammed President Biden — and thus Vice President Harris by proxy — over their inexplicable decision to trust the Taliban to secure the airport in Kabul.

“The Taliban wanted all people going into the Kabul airport to go through the south gate entrance where they had a checkpoint and they could check everybody that was coming in and if it was one of their high valued targets, they’re not going to let you in … they’re just going to kill you,” he said.

To this day, nobody has been held accountable for the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle. Many wonder whether anyone ever will …

Vivek Saxena
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