Biden leaves behind US-sponsored journalists he promised to evacuate from Afghanistan: LIVE UPDATES
The United States was unable to evacuate U.S.-sponsored journalists from Afghanistan despite the Biden administration promising to get them out of the country.
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A Department of Homeland Security Spokesperson told Fox News that 31,107 people have arrived in the United States from Afghanistan since Aug. 17.
Of those, 4,446 (14%) are U.S. Citizens. Another 2,785 (9%) are U.S. Lawful Permanent Residents, while 23,876 (77%) are other Afghans at Risk.
The Afghans at risk include SIV and other visa holders, SIV applicants, and P-1 and P-2 referrals.
"This group includes a small number of third country nationals that were also evacuated and processed," the spokesperson said. "This breakdown will change as early flights were more heavily weighted towards U.S. Citizens."
The turmoil in Afghanistan appears to be yesterday's news, at least according to Wednesday night's installment of "CBS Evening News."
The CBS program completely ignored the latest developments surrounding President Biden's military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the fallout since he took a victory lap from the White House.
Among several controversies plaguing the Biden administration include the hundreds of U.S. citizens who were left stranded in the Taliban-controlled country following the Aug. 31 deadline and the controversial phone call Biden reportedly had with then-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in July, suggesting the president knowingly misled the country about the stability of Afghanistan ahead of the troop withdrawal.
They move from place to place at a moment's notice in a desperate bid to evade the Taliban — girls whose lives are in danger simply because they chose to play a sport they loved.
An international effort to evacuate members of the Afghanistan national girls soccer team, along with dozens of family members and soccer federation staff, suffered a crushing setback last week after a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport killed 169 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members during a harrowing airlift.
Democrats and liberals have a penchant for ignoring the empirical facts of various crises and instead inventing – rather than simply alluding to – a "silver lining" to absolve them of any responsibility and deflect from the truth, "The Five" host Will Cain said Tuesday.
With the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan that left 13 military servicemembers dead and untold numbers of American citizens stranded with a terrorist regime running the country, President Joe Biden and his administration sought to underline the fact the U.S. was leaving the country after a 20-year war:
Nikki Haley
Former U.S. ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley joined "America Reports" to react to the press conference with the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on the crisis in Afghanistan.
NIKKI HALEY: I was really disturbed by that press conference because all they did was talk about was how they closed this out. It was like they wanted a pat on the back. It’s like they wanted to say that this book was closed. The book is not closed because you have hundreds of thousands of Americans still sitting there in Afghanistan that need to get out, so this book is not closed and it goes against the moral code of the military, which is you leave no American behind. So, Austin and Milley know that. They know that every military veteran, combat veteran like my husband, is still thinking about the Americans that were left behind, still thinking about the Afghan allies that are behind so to imply that this book is closed, to say that you’re going to a diplomatic operation, is implying that you’re going to a hostage situation. There’s nothing comforting about that.
The State Department on Wednesday sought to reassure those stuck in Afghanistan, saying they it will provide "tailored" evacuation plans to get them out of the Taliban-controlled nation.
"These efforts did not end on Aug. 31 and they will not end until we have secured the evacuation of any American citizen and LPRs [Legal Permanent Resident] and folks who worked with us and served the American people and want to get out," State Department spokesperson Ned Price told reporters.
MSNBC host Chris Hayes is appearing to minimize the controversial leaked phone call President Biden had with then-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, which suggested the president knowingly perpetuated a false narrative amid the military withdrawal from Afghanistan.
According to a transcript of the July 23 presidential call reviewed by Reuters, Biden didn’t anticipate the Taliban’s rapid advance across Afghanistan, which ended when they stormed Kabul on Aug. 15 and Ghani fled the presidential palace. Instead, Biden focused much of the 14-minute call on the Afghan government’s "perception" problem, Reuters reported.
"I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban," Biden said. "And there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture."
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday defended President Biden for his "courageous decision" to withdraw from Afghanistan.
The Democratic congresswoman's defense of Biden comes amid intense criticism of the president's handling of the withdrawal, which resulted in hundreds of Americans being stranded in Afghanistan.
Ocasio-Cortez shared a video of past remarks in which she blasted a military contractor over the profit margins of a certain type of vehicular disc, suggesting that critics of the botched withdrawal are motivated by Department of Defense contracts.
Three retired military leaders – including two generals – have called for the resignations of President Biden's top military and diplomatic officials, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and national security advisor Jake Sullivan, in the wake of the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal.
"I think it’s a leadership failure in the White House, as well as in the State Department, as well as in the DOD," Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William "Jerry" Boykin told Fox News in an interview Wednesday. "I think we need to recognize it as such. I think the president has been a miserable failure on this."
Former government speechwriters and messaging experts are slamming President Biden over his address to the nation Tuesday, criticizing the president for his defensive delivery and contradictory statements, while the nation mourns the deaths of 13 U.S. service members and while Americans remain stranded in Afghanistan.
Biden delivered a fiery speech a day after U.S. troops fully exited from Afghanistan, taking full "responsibility" for the decision to remove troops, while also shifting blame onto former President Donald Trump and the Afghan security forces for the chaos and death that unfolded.
Biden's speech was poorly written and even more poorly delivered, communications experts told Fox News.
Clay Travis
President Joe Biden isn’t being honest when he talks about Afghanistan, OutKick founder Clay Travis insisted.
"Biden labeled it an extraordinarily successful mission. That is a lie," Travis said in his latest video. "This was not an extraordinarily successful mission. This was the biggest American foreign policy failure of my life."
White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Wednesday dodged questions about a leaked phone call in which President Biden pressed former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to change the "perception" of the Taliban’s advancement in Afghanistan, "whether it is true or not," less than four weeks before Kabul fell to the terror group.
Asked during her daily press briefing to confirm the contents of the call, Psaki refused.
"Well, I'm not going to get into private, diplomatic conversations or leaked transcripts of phone calls," she said. "But what I can reiterate for you is that we have stated many times that no one anticipated … that the Taliban would be able to take over the country as quickly as they did or that the Afghan National Security Forces would fold as quickly as they did."
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley hailed military heroism in Afghanistan, in the top Pentagon officials’ first public remarks since the complete withdrawal of U.S. military assets from the region.
"It's been a busy time for all of us in this department, a proud one and a solemn one, too," Austin said. "We have concluded our historic evacuation operation and ended the last mission of the U.S. war in Afghanistan."
DOHA, Qatar - One-third of Afghanistan is facing food insecurity amid the Taliban takeover, according to the United Nations' World Food Programme (WFP).
In an effort to address the impending crisis, WFP executive director David Beasley told Fox News his organization is looking to raise $200 million by the end of 2021.
"If we don’t preposition the food we need in those difficult areas that you can’t reach once winter sets in ... we could have a catastrophe," Beasley said.
This breakdown shows how much U.S. taxpayer funding went to Humvees for the now-defunct Afghan National Army from the start of 2020 until July of this year. (Photo: Javed Tanveer/AFP via Getty images, Illustration: Ian Jopson/Fox News)
The U.S. spent $278.4 million on Humvees for the Afghan National Army since January 2020. Many of them are now in Taliban hands.
Top Pentagon officials Wednesday said it is "possible" the United States will work with the Taliban against ISIS-K in Afghanistan, while warning that the Taliban are a "ruthless group from the past."
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley on Wednesday made their first public remarks since the complete withdrawal of U.S. military assets from Afghanistan.
Disgraced ex-CBS anchor Dan Rather was crushed by critics over a tweet attacking pro-life Americans who've also criticized the Biden administration for abandoning vulnerable women in Afghanistan amid its takeover by the Taliban.
"It’s worth noting that many of the same people attacking the Biden Administration for leaving women’s rights behind in Afghanistan are eager to control women’s bodies and choices in the United States," Rather tweeted Tuesday, in a clear comparison of pro-life Americans to the radical Taliban.
Click here to watch on Fox News at 2:45 p.m. ET.
"Some" of the estimated 27 students from Sacramento who were stranded in Afghanistan as of Tuesday after U.S. troops left Kabul "may be in transit" out of the country.
The San Juan Unified School District, where the students and their 19 families are from, told Fox News on Wednesday that the numbers of students stuck in and leaving Afghanistan "continue to change rapidly."
"We believe that some of these families may be in transit out of Afghanistan, as we have not been able to reach many of them in the last few days," school district communications director Raj Rai said in a statement. "We stand ready to support these students and families in whatever way that we can, and are working closely with state officials to provide them information as we receive it from our families."
Click here to read more on Fox News.
This is in addition to the 13 killed in action.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced Wednesday he will be traveling to the Persian Gulf region to thank nations who helped evacuate Afghans and Americans from Kabul.
He also called the evacuation from Kabul the "largest" in history.
More than 124,000 civilians, including 6,000 Americans were brought to safety amid “grave and growing threats," Austin added, while saying that of the 13 Americans killed in action, “many too young to personally remember the 9/11 attacks.”
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Aircraft are parked on the tarmac of the Hamid Karzai International Airport after the U.S. military's withdrawal, in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Tuesday. (AP)
Senior State Department officials said Wednesday that since U.S. forces withdrew from Kabul, looting, damage and destruction of equipment that is essential to operating its airport is going to delay the ongoing effort to reopen it, according to Fox News’ Nick Kalman.
When speaking about evacuations, one official said “viral communications” were a huge problem in terms of getting information to priority groups of people.
“Everything we tried to communicate was immediately available to a massive pool of people… any effort we used to prioritize was almost instantly ubiquitous,” the official continued.
“It wasn’t pretty, it was very challenging and because of the constraints,” the official added, we are “haunted by choices we had to make and the people we were unable to help.”
The official also said '“I don't have an estimate for you on the numbers of Special Immigrant Visas and family members who are still there, but I would say it’s the majority of them just based on anecdotal information about the populations we were able to support.”
A New Jersey man is fearful for his family, who went on a summer trip to Afghanistan but have now ended up stranded after the U.S. withdrew all of its troops.
"They should have been home last week. It should have been about a week now since they been home. But, everything that happened it is honestly crazy. I don’t know what to think. I have been sitting here praying. My uncles, my aunts, everybody, we are all praying. We are trying to make sure they come home safe and sound," Mohsen told "Fox & Friends."
It is "unbelievable" to Mohsen that his family is trapped in Afghanistan because they are U.S. passport holders. He said in every attempt they made to go to the Kabul airport, they were turned away and the "gates were either closed or they weren’t allowed in."
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The United States was unable to evacuate U.S.-sponsored journalists from Afghanistan despite the Biden administration promising to get them out of the country.
"It is absolutely disgraceful the U.S. State Department claimed they evacuated their local employees when in reality they abandoned hundreds of U.S. Agency for Global Media journalists and their families. Some of these journalists were given express assurances by the Biden Administration that they would be treated as locally employed staff – but were not," Republican Texas Rep. Michael McCaul said in a statement on Tuesday.
"My office was working with one of these journalists and tried for two weeks to get attention brought to his case so he, his wife, and his infant child could be saved – but our pleas were ignored. I am calling on the president and the State Department to rapidly find ways to get these people to safety and away from the threats President Biden and Secretary Blinken enabled," he added.
Fox News confirmed that Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) journalists were unable to get aboard the last flights from Afghanistan on Monday, after national security Adviser Jake Sullivan said on Sunday that groups prioritized by the U.S. government made it to evacuation planes.
Click here to read more on Fox News.
A Taliban member looks up near a damaged helicopter at the airport in Kabul on Tuesday. (AFP via Getty Images
Taliban fighters are feeling angry and betrayed Wednesday after discovering that Afghan National Army helicopters abandoned at Kabul’s airport have been rendered inoperable by departing U.S. troops, according to a report.
An Al Jazeera reporter who toured a hanger on the military side of the airport said in a video that the terrorist group "expected the Americans to leave helicopters like this in one piece for their use."
"When I said to them, ‘why do you think that the Americans would have left everything operational for you’? They said because we believe it is a national asset and we are the government now and this could have come to great use for us," she continued.
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The Taliban is firmly in control of Afghanistan following the U.S. military's departure, and experts don’t think there will be a free press under the new regime because the group prefers propaganda and barbaric treatment of women over the pillars of democracy.
"Basic freedoms are not tolerated, freedom of the press being one of them," Fox News contributor Daniel Hoffman said. "It's a terrorist state. They're going to shut down all sorts of freedoms. That's the legacy that we've left behind."
Hoffman, who served as director of the CIA Middle East and North Africa Division, said the Taliban simply doesn’t care for America or what it stands for, and the group shouldn’t be expected to realistically comply.
"I don't think there's any expectation that these guys are going to respect women's rights or freedom of the press or any other stuff that, look, they just fought a 20-year war against us. They don't like us," Hoffman said.
Click here to read more on Fox News.
President Joe Biden speaks about the end of the war in Afghanistan from the State Dining Room of the White House on Tuesday. (AP)
President Biden is facing a crisis of confidence in his ability to serve as commander in chief due to the overwhelming negative fallout he is receiving over the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, which left 13 U.S. service members dead and Americans and Afghan allies stranded.
Former defense officials, military leaders and members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have criticized Biden for leaving Americans behind as the last U.S. C-17 plane took off from Kabul Monday night, despite the president's promise weeks ago that "If there are American citizens left, we're going to stay until we get them all out."
Foreign policy experts are also warning that the international credibility of the U.S. has diminished, as both allies and adversaries now view America and the Biden administration as weak and unable to protect its own citizens and crucial partners from the Taliban and terrorist attacks.
Click here to read more on Fox News.
Kissimmee police chief Jeff O'Dell joins 'Fox & Friends First' to discuss what his officers did to pay homage to fallen service members.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is claiming Wednesday that the United States’ nearly 20-year-long military presence in Afghanistan accomplished “zero,” according to the Associated Press.
The U.S. “was trying... to civilize the people who live there, to introduce their norms and standards of life in the broadest sense of the word, including the political organization of society,” he reportedly said. “The result is sheer tragedies, sheer losses, both for those who were doing that -- the U.S. -- and more so for the people who live in Afghanistan. A zero result, if not negative.”
President Biden is set to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on Wednesday – a visit that is expected to build on and amplify the bilateral relationship, and to underscore the United States’ "ironclad" commitment to Ukraine’s security and sovereignty, senior administration officials said.
The two leaders have spoken twice by phone – once in April, and once in June before Biden met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva.
Senior administration officials said Biden and Zelensky will chair an expanded bilateral meeting with their key advisers, and will later transition to a one-on-one conversation, giving them "the space to communicate with one another more directly."
Soldiers, assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division, prepare to board a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III aircraft in support of the final noncombatant evacuation operation missions at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. (Senior Airman Taylor Crul/U.S. Air Force via AP)
The service members who fought in Afghanistan over the past 20 years can hold their "head up high" for preventing an attack on the U.S. homeland, according to a letter posted Tuesday on the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Facebook page.
The letter was signed by Army Gen. Mark Milley, its chairman, and U.S. Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Ramón Colón-López. The note addressed the current challenges the military faces after the troop withdrawal from the country, but it largely focused on those who served and "fought tirelessly to defeat violent extremist organizations."
Paula Knauss, mother of fallen Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Knauss, is pointing fingers at the Biden administration for the death of her son during America’s messy withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The grieving mother stressed holding who’s at fault accountable on "The Ingraham Angle" Tuesday, starting with President Biden for trusting the enemy instead of putting the best interest of U.S. troops, Afghan allies and all Americans first.
"The president of the United States has the ability to help our troops, have enough men and women to stay safe," she said. "In all of our history, in all of the time that we have been fighting, where did you leave these men and women but at one airport, one location, one gate to funnel thousands through? And who did you trust? You trusted our enemy to allow who would come through."
President Biden’s approach to wrapping up U.S. presence in Afghanistan has caused bad blood between him, American soldiers and foreign friends, former U.S. ambassador to U.N. Nikki Haley told "Special Report" Tuesday.
Haley called Biden a "lame duck" president, reacting to his address confirming America's withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan ahead of the Aug. 31 deadline.
"It was pretty clear that by the end of that speech that President Biden gave it was the beginning of the lame-duck presidency," she said. "He has lost the trust and confidence of every member of the military and the military families I’m proud to be a part of. He’s lost the trust and confidence of our allies who are now negotiating without us because they don’t know why we’re going what we’re doing. He’s lost the trust and confidence of the American people."
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky attends a meeting with U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon on August 31, 2021 in Arlington, Virginia. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, is set to meet with President Biden on Wednesday and will bring up the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in the context of its own security assurances from Washington, a report said.
"The situation in Afghanistan seems to indicate a realignment of U.S. global commitments, and President Zelensky wants to hear from President Biden where Ukraine fits in," Andrew Mac, Zelensky’s adviser, told the New York Times.
Crowd carries makeshift coffins draped in NATO's, U.S. and a Union Jack flags during a pretend funeral on a street in Khost, Afghanistan August 31, 2021, in this screen grab obtained from a social media video. ZHMAN TV/via REUTERS (ZHMAN TV/via REUTERS)
Photos emerged Tuesday showing Taliban supporters in Afghanistan holding a mock funeral while hoisting coffins draped with flags from the U.S. and other NATO countries.
Reuters obtained some of the photos that were taken in Khost on Tuesday, less than a day after the last U.S. troop left the country after a nearly 20-year engagement.
The U.S. completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan late Monday, ending America’s longest war and closing a chapter in military history likely to be remembered for colossal failures, unfulfilled promises and a frantic exit of 123,000.
Oklahoma Rep. Markwayne Mullin allegedly threatened embassy staffers in Tajikistan when needing assistance in transporting a huge amount of cash into the country, in his attempt to enter neighboring Afghanistan, according to a report.
Mullin, a Republican, planned to hire a helicopter to enter Afghanistan and rescue five American citizens – a woman, and her four children, and he sought the ambassador's help, the Washington Post reported. He needed assistance bypassing Tajikistan’s laws on cash limits.
But when embassy officials told him no, Mullin allegedly threatened U.S. ambassador to Tajikistan, John Mark Pommersheim, and embassy staff, according to the paper.
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