A former Pence adviser said Trump had 4 years to help Afghan allies leave the country but Stephen Miller's 'racist hysteria' blocked it from happening
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
A former national security official blamed the Trump administration and Stephen Miller's "racist hysteria" for impeding the visa application process for Afghans who worked with the US.
Olivia Troye worked as the homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to Vice President Mike Pence. In a Twitter thread Friday, she blasted the Trump administration for its handling of the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) programs that provide a path to US residency for locals who worked with the US government in Afghanistan.
"There were cabinet mtgs about this during the Trump Admin where Stephen Miller would peddle his racist hysteria about Iraq & Afghanistan. He & his enablers across gov't would undermine anyone who worked on solving the SIV issue by devastating the system at DHS & State," Troye wrote.
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History is not an isolated event!
But but but but but ..... Biden.
Biden indeed. Trump certainly is as guilty as Biden in this disgrace. He knew this was coming and apparently did little to nothing to ensure the right thing happened. That doesn't clear Biden of the monumentally abysmal screwup he alone is responsible for. Biden owns his portion of the blame and there's no changing that.
The US fucked this up big time, we should have been pulling afghans out for the last 6-12 months. Everyone who helped us. I don't care that we just kinda peaced out and said "fuck it", that is fine and i wish we had done that a long time ago, I am just bothered that for al ong time we knew we were leaving and hadn't been evacuating our allies.
That miller is one sick, creepy piece of shit.
you can bet that along with a sheet, he's got an SS uniform hanging in his closet too...
No doubt. He just looks the part.
Careful Dev, the only person of Jewish extraction that can be attacked is Soros.
You mean like Jewish lasers?
Jewish Space Lasers was spewed by a member of The Republican Idiot Squad (Greene, Gaetz, Gohmert, Gosar, among other blithering idiots).
Keep up!
Lol says Ticketmaster himself.
He looks like a penis with eyes.
The way he looks and talks, he has the mark of Satan all over him. He fit in with Trump very well, as they are two of a kind.
Why would you evacuate Thosuands of Afghan allies years before the American withdrawal?
Do TDS suffering progressives ever think things through?
Because the opportunity to do so existed?
se the opportunity to do so existed
It's thinking like that explains why we withdrew our military before our civilians.
Think really hard about why it doesn't make sense to withdraw our helpers in a foreign country years before our troops. I bet you can figure out why that makes no sense.
But, if you insist on playing this silly game, let's just blame Obama and Biden for not withdrawing all the helpful Afghanis a decade or so ago, while the "opportunity existed" even though the opportunity existed until Biden took it away.
Think really hard about how many 'helpers' 13,000 American troops needed in Dec. 2019 and how many 'helpers' 8,600 American troops needed in July of 2020 and how many 2,500 'helpers' American troops needed in Jan. 2021. I bet you can figure out that we could have and SHOULD have been vetted Afghanis who needed SIVs LONG before Trump left office and evacuated the vast majority of the 70,000 eligable Afghanis over the last 4 years.
Neither Obama or Biden signed an agreement to leave Afghanistan. Trump did.
It didn't have to be years before the withdrawal. As soon as Trump negotiated with the Taliban (stupid idea) he should have begun the process of setting up the exit plan of our Afghan allies at the same time. Didn't necessarily have to move anyone, but as we pulled back, start sending them stateside. I agree that Trump screwed them in this aspect.
However, this doesn't absolve Biden of anything. Biden screwed this whole thing so badly it was as if he asked all our enemies how they'd like to see us exit Afghanistan and went and did that.
No, this is not Trump's fault. Trump can be blamed for failure to prepare, etc. but the actual withdrawal is squarely under the purview of the Biden administration. Key thing is that we should not have withdrawn if we did not have our processes in place to do so successfully.
I am very curious as to how it was possible for our military and civilian operational forces to fail, using just one example for now, to ensure safe passage for all we are protecting. That is so basic, it boggles the mind that it was not done.
No withdrawal from there would be successful.
I would agree with 'no withdrawal from there would be neat and easy'. We could have done much better than to leave so many people behind trying to get out while the Taliban is in control.
Like I said below, people have known for months we were pulling out.
What we are seeing is people that waited until the last minute to decide to leave.
Imo that would happen no matter the timeline.
We could have and should have planned it better. I don't know the evacuation of our allies hasn't been ongoing for months. I have been saying for YEARS that our top priority needs to be getting our allies out of that country. Even before we announced our plans to withdraw, because anyone with half a brain knew this was coming for years.
It does seem obvious that withdrawal would include as a top priority the safe evacuation of all allies and US citizens. I continue to look for a reason as to why this was not done but I have yet to hear an answer that makes sense to me.
It seems like the biggest oversight in the history of human rights...
The seed gives a pretty good clue for at least part of the reason. They had a year to vet Afghanis and dole out SIVs. They chose not to do it.
Biden had to start at square one and even Gen. Milley said that they expected to have months to catch up. They were wrong.
Hell, the UK and France bailed from Afghanistan years ago and they still haven't gotten their people out.
UK to bring home last remaining troops in Afghanistan this weekend | Afghanistan | The Guardian
Those UK troops were part of the UN mission. The vast majority left in Oct. 2014.
I'm sorry, but you don't get to blame this one on Trump. Joe Biden has been president for more than enough time to take control and responsibility for how we made our final exit from Afghanistan.
We can certainly have a conversation about what the Trump administration could have done differently or better over the course of four years, but nothing they did locked the Biden administration into leaving Afghanistan right this damned minute and ditching thousands of people in the process (not to mention lots of American military material that the Taliban are now using ).
Yes, the Taliban took over quicker than anyone expected - probably quicker than even they expected. But we also got out of the way so it could happen. If we wanted to delay their takeover, we obviously could have. Biden chose not to. He and his supporters won't like this, but events in Afghanistan now are entirely on him.
In many situations that is actually cheaper than bringing it back.
But yeah, we should have been evacuating people for months ahead of time. Biden really fucked that part up.
Perhaps, if you don't factor in the idea that it might make it easier for terrorists to kill you down the line.
We don't, but IMO we should blow up whatever we aren't taking.
A lot of the time units leave their equipment there for the next unit replacing them. Cheaper than each unit bringing their own, as you pointed out. However, I was under the impression that this stuff isn't equipment we abandoned. It is equipment the Afghan army was given and they abandoned it. Is that a misunderstanding on my part?
Doesn't really matter. We already wrote it off as a loss and never planned on bringing it back.
no. you are correct
If in the event that the air field is to be abandoned to the Taliban,
I predict spectacular accidental detonations of
JP-8 jet fuel left behind as the last flight reaches a safe distance,
rendering much of the military airfield unusable in the future.
At some point, there also has to be blame for people that just wouldn't leave.
I keep saying this but how stupid can one be when we announce we are leaving and people stay there.
Personal responsibility has to come into play for people that didn't leave at the beginning of this.
True, you can't save everybody - especially those who don't want to be saved or live in denial that they need saving.
And now these same people will yell and scream that there was no help, when they themselves should have gotten out of there a month ago.
What was the point in waiting. We have been seeing for weeks one town then another fall to the taliban. What were these people thinking, that it would stop before the town they were in?
I don't even know if we can say it took that long, though. I'm hearing it was basically ten days. Only a month ago, I think the administration was saying the country could fall to the Taliban in 6 months.
Still, we knew when we were going to be leaving and we could have greased the machinery to ease the exodus for those who would have wanted to leave. Since we didn't, I'm thinking maybe the administration was just like "fuck it." In spite of what politicians might say, I think they don't really want to take in refugees (from anywhere) if it can be avoided.
I also wonder how many of these 'civilians' are military contractors.
So here we are in August.
I agree, but it may be more complicated than that. There may be factors we aren't aware of. Like, just what were all these people doing there in the first place? Did they stay where they were because they were expecting a different exit plan than the one they got and they wanted to be as much help to our allies as they could? I'm pretty sure they weren't there on vacation so we should probably know what that purpose was before we judge them too harshly.
So yes, likely military contractors.
I'm sure that's true, but I also believe there are various charities there, trying to help. I did a search on charities in Afghanistan and there appear to be a number of them.
I am sure there are. Still though, there comes a time where they know the military is pulling out. Biden has been saying he was going to be out in September. Here we are August.
Yeah, that's a hard phrase to swallow, isn't it. A diplomatic agreement. With the Taliban.
Whatever. I guess the bottom line for the US is if they'll live up to their agreement to not allow terrorists to operate in Afghanistan. You know: no terrorists other than the Taliban.
My understanding is they actually don't like the ISIS folks, so maybe they'll happily do their part.
So you think we should stay there?
Oh, heck no. I didn't particularly want to go in the first place because I figured we'd end up being there for 20 years.
It's one thing to hunt down Al Qaeda but it never stops there. We took care of our main objectives in Afghanistan (other than capturing Osama bin Laden) in the first couple of years. All of this trying to build up Afghanistan as a nation was never going to work.
Even so, if it could have been done quickly, that would have been fine. Once it became evident, though, that we were trying prop up a bunch of incompetent and corrupt grifters, we should have cut bait. Or even beyond that, once we killed bin Laden, we could have left. That was 2011.
Their contracts were cancelled around 07/02, most of them left by 07/15 with all of our combat troops.
What I think is hilarious is that Afghans rescued during the Trump presidency who would have become Americans would probably have voted for Trump as being their hero. LOL Immigrants from Mexico as well.