President Joe Biden did right to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan after 20 years of futile war, but he needed a plan to get 15,000 other Americans out with them.
He didn’t have one, the National Pulse’s Raheem Kassam has revealed, because the geniuses who run his State Department killed a Trump-created program to do just that.
Biden’s people jettisoned the program two months ago. Now, thousands of terrified Americans await evacuation — hoping the last thing they hear won’t be blood-curdling shouts of “Allahu Akbar” as a scimitar lops off heads.
CCR, OpMed
Trump’s State Department officials created the Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau (CCR) “to handle medical, diplomatic, and logistical support concerning Americans overseas,” Kassam reported.
The bureau was a spin-off of the department’s Operational Medicine (OpMed) subsidiary, which provides medical care to diplomats and their families and also manages evacuations.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who thought flying the rainbow flag over the embassy in Kabul was a bright idea, told Vanity Fair in May that OpMed provided “the platform and personnel to save American lives around the world, especially in times of crisis. During the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, OpMed was integral to our evacuation and repatriation of 100,000 Americans to the United States as countries began locking down their borders.”
Run by a former Special Forces doctor, OpMed “emerged from the ashes of Benghazi, where, on September 11, 2012, militants attacked the U.S. consulate, killing America’s ambassador to Libya, an information management officer, and two CIA contractors,” the magazine reported.
The “grossly inadequate” response to the Benghazi attack by Hillary Clinton’s State Department showed that the department “must ensure it has the capability to rapidly deploy crisis responders and evacuate […] personnel in harm’s way.”
In October 2020, an insider diplomat’s blog reported that Trump’s team at State would create the Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau out of OpMed. Careerists opposed the move, and successfully deep-sixed the idea when Biden landed in the White House.
Terminate CCR
Deputy Secretary of State Brian McKeon canceled the program on June 11, Kassam reported. The decision “to pause the program may have come as early as February, both undermining the original Trump-era date for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, and certainly giving the Taliban time to threaten American assets and lives on the run up to Joe Biden’s September 11th date of withdrawal.”
In an “action memorandum for the secretary,” McKeon recommended the “discontinuation of the establishment, and termination of, the Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau (CCR).”
Kassam also pointed to the department’s 2022 budget document that said OpMed (CCR) was paused. “The National Pulse also understands no Congressional notification was sent to the United States Congress, as is required, upon the pause,” he reported.
Looking at what has transpired in Afghanistan, former President Trump is understandably furious.
“My Administration prioritized keeping Americans safe, Biden leaves them behind,” he told Kassam:
Canceling this successful Trump Administration program before the withdrawal that would have helped tens of thousands Americans reach home is beyond disgraceful. Our withdrawal was conditions-based and perfect, it would have been flawlessly executed and nobody would have even known we left. The Biden execution and withdrawal is perhaps the greatest embarrassment to our Country in History, both as a military and humanitarian operation.
Biden’s Statement
Equally disturbing is what Biden said to ABC’s Geoge Stephanopolous about Afghanistan and U.S. policy in the region. The interview clearly suggests the president’s cognitive decline is worsening.
Though 900 U.S. troops are in Syria, Biden told Stephanopolous that “we don’t have military” in the country. In late July, a Biden official told Politico those troops would stay there indefinitely.
When Stephanopolous reminded Biden that the Taliban victory was, in Biden’s words, “highly unlikely,” Biden insisted that he was right. His own intelligence advisers said they would prevail by the end of the year.
More disturbingly, Biden was unconcerned that Afghans tried to leave Kabul by clinging to the sides of departing U.S. C17s.
Stephanopolous asked Biden what he thought about the photos, a chance for him to show the love and compassion he and his backers said Trump lacked. Biden replied testily: “That was four days ago, five days ago.”
That shouldn’t matter. But that aside, such is Biden’s disconnect from reality that he didn’t know the images were just two days old.
ABC posted the story about the interview at 4:24 p.m. yesterday. That means Biden spoke to the former Clinton factotum well before the elderly with dementia or Alzheimer’s begin sundowning, the term that describes the confusion and aggression that typically begins about dusk.
