Tapper Calls Out Biden Admin on Evacuating Allies in Afghanistan: They ‘Knew This Was Coming’ and ‘Haven’t Started Acting on It’ Until Just Now
CNN’s Jake Tapper called out the Biden administration Friday over the need to evacuate U.S. allies in Afghanistan.
President Joe Biden’s plan to withdraw from Afghanistan led to questions about evacuating interpreters and translators who aided U.S. forces. The first group of evacuated interpreters and their families arrived in the United States early Friday after departing from Kabul, but there are still many more who need that assistance.
Politico reported Friday that lawmakers in both parties have been frustrated by the “failure” of the Biden administration to “to sufficiently prepare for the avalanche of visa applications and the need to quickly evacuate those Afghans from the country,” given the threat from the Taliban controlling more territory.
Tapper spoke with Matt Zeller, an Afghanistan veteran who co-founded No One Left Behind to help these interpreters. The organization was founded by Zeller and Janis Shinwari, an Afghan interpreter who saved Zeller’s life in a firefight.
Zeller said the arrival of the first group “felt like seeing a promise kept,” but emphasized, “It only represents 0.3 percent of all the Afghans waiting. There’s 99.7 percent of them, which is around 88,000 people, who are still left behind in Afghanistan desperate to get here.”
He told Tapper there needs to be “an avalanche of an effort” to help these thousands more.
Zeller talked about how how personal this issue is for him, saying, “We can design, build, fly, and land a rover to Mars faster than we can get one of these people their visas. It’s atrocious. We’re out of time. What we need now is the largest airlift since Berlin in 1948 to move them.”
What alarms him is hearing that the only place people are being flown out of is Kabul when “over half of them live outside of Kabul with no means to get there.”
“With so much land controlled by the Taliban, they might not be able to get to Kabul,” Tapper said.
“They can’t. The roads are controlled by the Taliban,” Zeller noted.
“The Biden administration knew this was coming, and they haven’t started acting on it in a real way until just now,” Tapper said.
“We’ve been sounding the alarm now for months. It’s been radio silence from the administration,” Zeller said. He pointed to the bipartisan support this effort has in Congress and added, “Since May they’ve been all telling the Biden administration we have to evacuate these people. Why didn’t we do it while we had the troops in place to do so?”
“Well, they didn’t and we’re going to stay on top of this story,” Tapper said.
You can watch above, via CNN.
