Veterans Rob O'Neill, Dakota Meyer slam Biden admin for the Afghanistan debacle
Rob O'Neil, who killed Usama Bin Laden, and Dakota Meyer, retired Marine, with reaction to the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan after the Taliban takes Kabul.
For the past four years, any change that President Donald Trump made to the United States’ foreign policy, liberal politicians and their allies in the media told us that the sky was falling and that people would die.
This week, thanks to President Joe Biden’s incompetence, American soldiers and our allies are actually going to die. These deaths will be graphic, cruel, purposeful, and, sadly, avoidable. For me, and the many men and women who served in Afghanistan, this is a particularly gut-wrenching failure.
When my legs were blown off on Sept. 19, 2010, I was moving across the battlefield in Kandahar, Afghanistan, narrowing in on a high-value target. As a bomb tech, it was my job to clear the way for the rest of our team, finding and disposing of any improvised explosive devices (IEDs). One member of our team was an Afghan interpreter who I’ll call Tom.
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Tom always had a helmet that was too big, and the weight of his night vision goggles would make it wobble like a bobblehead on a dashboard. Once, he was on a mission and his tennis shoes got stuck in the mud, so he finished the mission barefoot. He had a young son and daughter. He fought alongside us, was a friend to America, and now, I have no idea where he or his family is.
In their moment of need, President Biden abandoned our allies and betrayed the thousands of men and women who sacrificed everything they had in pursuit of peace.
President Biden has abandoned the Afghan men and women who risked their lives for our war, and rather than execute any sort of plan that protects our interests and our allies, he’s spending all of his time assigning blame to everyone but himself. It is completely unforgivable. Because of his failures, it is a very real possibility that the next time I turn on the news, I’ll be forced to watch Tom beheaded.
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The first step in applying for a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV), the program that Congress designed specifically for the interpreters and other support staff that worked alongside myself and thousands of other U.S. troops, is to get a signed letter from a U.S. military commander proving that they served with us.
In what world, though, is someone going to hold onto the proof that the Taliban would use to sign their death warrant? Anyone with a letter like that is almost certainly burning it as we speak in an effort to cover their tracks, keep themselves safe and prevent their family from being beheaded.
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They are on the run. The Taliban has shut down the borders and commercial flights, so they’re fish in a barrel. They’re sleeping in pomegranate orchards and opium fields, moving from house to house, just trying to stay alive.
We’ve heard from people reaching out with the hotel and room number they are hiding out in, telling us that the Taliban is going door to door. These people are asking if they cross the Hindu Kush into Pakistan, will they be allowed into our embassy there?
For those who’ve begun the SIV process, if by some miracle their application is approved, how does the State Department plan to let them know – a singing telegram? For our allies still in Afghanistan, any contact with United States forces will mean being hanged outside their home, having their wives raped, having their daughters kidnapped, and seeing their sons murdered.
The president has not learned the most important commitment of our soldiers: we do not leave men behind.
This is not hyperbolic. This is an alarm I’ve been sounding for months: my office has been working on numerous cases for Afghans who served with veterans I know personally. Some have been successful, but most the State Department tells us "fell through the cracks."
In May, I asked the special envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, how the administration planned to process the tens of thousands of SIVs as military operations wound down. He was clueless.
He couldn’t even tell me how many Afghans were eligible for the program, let alone how the administration would be able to work through the years-long backlog of applications before the president’s deadline.
Each person that the administration dismissed as "falling through the cracks" was issued a death sentence by President Joe Biden for the crime of being an ally to the United States of America.
Now, President Biden has sent 7,000 U.S. troops into Afghanistan in order to evacuate American personnel and a small number of Afghans, but the cavalry isn’t coming for anyone else. He is even refusing to call it a "combat mission" because he doesn’t want the bad optics of admitting he failed.
History has taught us that if optics is more important to President Biden than defeating our enemies, Americans and our allies will be killed. He is repeating the mistakes of disasters like the Beirut Marine barracks bombing, the Battle of Mogadishu and the Vietnam War.
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In their moment of need, President Biden abandoned our allies and betrayed the thousands of men and women who sacrificed everything they had in pursuit of peace.
The president has not learned the most important commitment of our soldiers: we do not leave men behind. As a result, he does not deserve to have the words "commander" or "chief" anywhere in his title.