Secretary of State Antony Blinken declined to say Monday whether the US could guarantee the safe evacuation of a group of female students at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music who were turned away from the Kabul airport by State Department officials.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Blinken that before Afghanistan was reconquered by the Taliban last month, “I was on the phone with very high ranking officials at State, DoD, the White House, trying to save lives.”
“We had Americans that couldn’t get out,” McCaul went on. “We had interpreters that couldn’t get through the perimeter of the Taliban. They are left behind, they will be executed. They do have a bull’s eye on their back.
“We had four buses of Afghan girls, orphans, at the American University’s school of music that sat there for 17 hours, when I was finally told the State Department would not lift the gate to let them in to safety, even though they had an aircraft waiting.”
McCaul said the girls are now “at the mercy of the Taliban” and asked Blinken: “Can you guarantee to this committee that we will get them out?”
Blinken responded by thanking McCaul for his efforts to get Americans and their allies out of Afghanistan before defending the work of his department.
Antony Blinken testified to the House Foreign Affairs Committee about the State Department’s efforts to rescue American citizens and allies from Afghanistan during the withdrawal. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst“I have men and women in my department, the State Department, who raised their hands from around the world and ran into the building [Hamid Karzai International Airport]. They went from posts around the world into that airport to help people get out,” the secretary said.
“They were serving at the gates right alongside our brothers and sisters in uniform, including the 13 who gave their lives, literally trying to pull people in as necessary — or to walk them in, to talk them in, to do everything they possibly could to bring American citizens, to bring Afghans at risk, to bring the nationals of our partners and others into the airport.”
However, Blinken made no mention of the girls and whether he could guarantee their safe passage out of Afghanistan. Nor did he predict when or whether the estimated 100 American citizens and thousands of legal permanent residents and visa holders who remain in the country could leave.
McCaul also pressed Blinken on whether Russian President Vladimir Putin had warned the White House against establishing intelligence gathering systems in countries bordering Afghanistan and questioned the secretary about how the US can counter the national security threat from terrorists without any presence in Afghanistan.
“This is an important question and one that in its detail and substance, I think we need to take up in another setting,” Blinken answered.
Rep. McCaul warned Antony Blinken that those left behind in Afghanistan now have a “bull’s eye on their back.” REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst“Let me just say this very broadly and you know this very well, given your focus and expertise on these issues, the terrorist threat has metastasized dramatically over the last 20 years, and it’s most acute in places like Yemen, like Libya, like Iraq, like Syria, like Somalia,” he added before acknowledging that the US lost “some of that capacity by not having boots on the ground in Afghanistan.”
“We have ways – and we are very actively working on that,” Blinken said, “to make up for that, to mitigate for that, to make sure we have eyes on the problem.”
