WASHINGTON – The State Department did not send its elite forces to assist in the failed evacuation of Americans and their allies from Afghanistan in August 2021, a former Foreign Service official told Congressional investigators.
“I can’t speak for everyone who was there, but from my perspective, there were at least a few people, at least four, maybe more, that it wasn’t the right choice to send there,” Sam Aronson said. Stated. He served as a consular volunteer during the operation, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee in a transcript of a Sept. 15, 2023, interview released Monday.
“They didn’t have the soft skills like adaptability and resilience; the experience of serving in a dangerous or high-threat overseas environment,” Aronson added. Aronson said volunteers to assist with the evacuation were recruited from major U.S. embassies and consulates around the world. In contrast to a small embassy where the entire consular department only has three people, inevitably there will be three or four people absent. ”
“When it comes to really high-risk, high-threat scenarios like Monastery Gate,” Aronson, who joined the Foreign Service in 2015 and has spent time in Niger and Nigeria in West Africa, said of some of his fellow volunteers, insisted. The way I see it, they weren’t mentally prepared to deal with the stress that came with it. ”
On August 26, 2021, an ISIS-K suicide bomber detonated an explosive vest at the monastery gates of Hamid Karzai International Airport, killing 13 American service members as military personnel processed people seeking refuge. and hundreds of Afghans were killed.
Aronson told investigators that the volunteer selection process was “ad hoc” and suggested that “consular chiefs shipped individuals from their respective countries because it would be a burden on the consular department.”
“From my perspective, they weren’t playing their best,” he added. “In fact, they may have made the worst of it.”
Aronson also said the State Department should have sent diplomats to Afghanistan sooner, lamenting their late arrival in Kabul on August 20, 2021, five days after the capital fell to the Taliban. Ta.
“I think if I or a more competent person had been there a minute earlier, we would have been able to evacuate people for at least a minute,” he said.
The problem of poorly equipped staff also extended to the Kabul embassy. Aronson said Mission Director Ross Wilson had copied his predecessor, John Bass, after the State Department dispatched the former ambassador to try to defuse the deteriorating situation.
Instead of taking responsibility himself, Wilson “acted as the public face of this evacuation, but behind the scenes, you know, behind the curtain, John Bass was actually leading the evacuation,” Aronson said. said.
“He seemed overwhelmed,” a witness said of Wilson. “His physical health didn’t seem to be very good. His mental health didn’t seem to be very good either. And I didn’t get the feeling that he was a strong leader, or at least not very good. At the time I was there, I didn’t believe he had strong leadership.”
“While State Department leadership sent the appropriate personnel to accomplish the mission, it was not always able to remove the unsuitable personnel already in place,” Aronson added. “The way I see it, the optics would have looked embarrassing, and they wouldn’t have looked very good if Ambassador Wilson had returned home when John Bass arrived.”
Wilson was responsible for evacuating approximately 4,000 U.S. diplomats and consular personnel in Afghanistan. Gave vague testimony regarding the withdrawal.
“The outlook was not good,” he admitted in an interview on October 24, 2023. “I can be honest about that. But there was good reason to believe that Afghan security forces could protect the government and key areas of the country for some time.”
“I think it’s been clear for a long time that there is a significant number of American citizens. [special immigrant visa] Not only the recipients and applicants who we wanted to leave the country, but also other Afghans who we depend on in some way, have close relationships with, and want to leave the country. “There were a lot of them,” he said. Added.
The committee members pointed out that interview Wilson spoke to CBS News on Aug. 25, 2021, five days before the last military plane left Afghanistan, in which he said he had already “issued repeated warnings” in March 2021. ”, claimed that “the people chose not to leave Afghanistan.”
“I regret everything about that interview,” Wilson replied. “A lot of people criticized me for my victim-blaming comments, which were absolutely correct. And I’m sorry I did that. I make no excuses.”
The diplomat said elsewhere that “concrete plans” for the withdrawal of U.S. troops began to be put into motion around May 2021, with a deadline of September 11 originally set by President Biden. U.S. intelligence agencies have become “increasingly negative about the prospects for the Afghan government in particular,” he said. It was late July. ”
Wilson finally recommended evacuation of all personnel on August 15, but the effort lasted 15 days and still left more than 1,000 Americans stranded in the country.
“I fully accept some responsibility for what happened there and what went wrong, but it probably goes back to the second thing I said: This is a shared responsibility,” Wilson said. I testified. “That’s the nature of this beast.”
“If we had left earlier, the thousands of SIV applicants we collected would not have been able to leave, regardless of how many days you want to talk about,” he added. “We would not have been able to provide assistance to American citizens attempting to escape.”
“Our eyes and ears on what’s going on around us would have been significantly reduced. Again, I’m happy with the recommendations I made and the time I made them. “The outcome is 20/20. I had to deal with the situation I was in, but I’m happy I made the right decision,” he continued.
“It’s a shame that we don’t have an embassy right now, because we don’t know what’s going on there. And we have no way at all to help those who helped us. Others… Needless to say, I think that’s a mistake. I understand why it happened. I brought it on. But I think it’s a great loss. A great loss. And it’s a huge loss in Afghanistan and there. It’s a big loss for our profits.”
