I Cannot Call Evacuation a Success : New Details of Afghanistan Chaos | RealClearPolitics
In a transcribed interview before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, former Foreign Service officer Samuel Aronson said the very opposite in living, harrowing color. Let me be clear, he told lawmakers behind closed doors, I cannot call this evacuation a success.
The questions and answers from Aronson, who received a State Department commendation for his heroism during the evacuation, as well as Ambassador Ross Wilson, the last U.S. diplomat to leave Afghanistan, were obtained by RealClearPolitics and have not been published previously.
Aronson recounted how American citizens, including children, were beaten by the Taliban, how U.S. passports were burned in a moment of panic when it seemed that Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul was about to be overrun, and how he delivered a horrible choice to a young Afghan mother.
Get on the airplane and never see your husband again or exit the airport and lose your only chance at freedom, Aronson told her, recalling for lawmakers the bleak exchange that summarized the mismanagement, and at times bureaucratic incompetence, of an evacuation that Biden himself had vowed would not be at all comparable to how the U.S. left Vietnam.