The chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan was further set back by special requests from lawmakers, veterans, White House officials and even the Vatican to get certain individuals and small groups out of the country, the senior commander of the operation groused to Army investigators.
Navy Rear Adm. Peter Vasely said the constant calls for help caused a “distraction” and “created competition for already stressed resources.”
Vasely’s account, based on a late September interview, was reported Thursday by the Washington Post, which obtained the 2,000-page report stemming from the probe of the harrowing 17-day operation earlier this week.
The investigation — launched in response to the deaths of 13 US service members and scores of Afghans in an ISIS-K suicide attack at the airport Aug. 26 — found that the White House and the State Department reacted too late to the Taliban’s rapid takeover of the country, causing the US military to hurriedly deploy more troops to provide security for the evacuation mission.
Vasely was asked during his interview whether reports that Pope Francis and first lady Jill Biden had intervened on behalf of certain people in Afghanistan were correct.
Navy Rear Adm. Peter Vasely said evacuation efforts were hampered by demands for special treatment by prominent people that created competition for already stressed resources. AFP via Getty Images“That’s accurate,” he replied. “I was being contacted by representatives from the Holy See to assist the Italian military contingent … in getting through groups … of special interest to the Vatican. That is just one of many examples.”
“I cannot stress enough how these high-profile requests ate up bandwidth and created competition for already stressed resources,” he continued.
At one point, Vasely said, he had to divert personnel to create a “coordination cell” that processed the thousands of phone calls, text messages and emails from Washington and elsewhere that swamped the US operations center at Kabul’s international airport.
Vasely said he received calls from the Holy See to evacuate specific individuals. AFP via Getty Images
Vasely said first lady Jill Biden also intervened in the evacuations. Getty ImagesThe situation was made even more untenable by social media, with some users pressuring the military to rescue certain dogs.
Vasely said the top priority was to get American citizens out of the country, then lawful permanent residents and finally Afghans who assisted the US during the 20-year war against the Taliban.
“But you had everyone from the White House down with a new flavor of the day for prioritization,” he told the Army investigators.
US troops involved in the withdrawal were also flooded with requests for help via voice messages and emails from people they didn’t know personally, but who had discovered they were deployed to Afghanistan.
As the operation went on, the calls increased — with some coming from media outlets worried about their journalists and Afghan staffers in the country.
Mark Jacobson, a former Pentagon official, told the Washington Post on Wednesday that military officials expressed their frustration over the repeated appeals.
Troops in Afghanistan were inundated with calls, texts and social media messages to remove specific people and even dogs from Afghanistan. U.S. Air Forces Europe-Africa viHe said some volunteer groups headed up by military veterans of the war sent along names of former interpreters and other Afghans who “were supposed to be at the front of the queue.”
“Once it became the ‘Hunger Games,’ ‘volunteers’ tried to get whomever we could through the gates,” Jacobson said.
When asked about the Army investigation at Wednesday’s Pentagon briefing, press secretary John Kirby said the documents show “a lot of good people making a lot of tough decisions in unrelenting circumstances, very difficult circumstances.”
“That 124,000 people were safely evacuated from Afghanistan, that’s no mean feat,” he said.
White House officials have stressed that President Biden was in constant contact with military commanders about the situation on the ground and what they needed for the operation.
”The president, at least once at each meeting — and these meetings were daily — would directly ask the people who were on the ground in Kabul, ‘Is there anything else that you need to execute what you’ve been asked to do?’ ” Jon Finer, the White House principal deputy national security adviser, told the Washington Post.
Vasely told the investigators that while he believes the pleas were made in good faith, “it was a distraction from the main effort, as they were coming directly to the individuals on the ground trying to accomplish the task at hand.”
The White House described the evacuations as “no mean feet” and touted that 124,000 people were evacuated from Afghanistan. Getty ImagesThe commander also said that by Aug. 22 or 23, “it was clear we weren’t going to get all Americans out” and that high-level conversations took place about extending the evacuation beyond the end of August. He added that the Taliban had a “visceral response” to the idea and the notion was scrapped.
