Afghanistan: Breaking the Cone of Silence

One of the under-covered stories right now is the plight of America’s Afghan allies whom the Biden administration left behind when it surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban, abandoned our bases, and decamped the theater of our longest war. There are estimates that as many as 100,000 are still stranded in Aghanistan, where they are in hiding and being hunted by Taliban assassination squads.This was the topic this week at a parley hosted by the publisher of the Sun, Dovid Efune, for the paper’s Founder members. The evening featured a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army, Scott Mann, and a former State Department spokeswoman, Heather Nauert. They’re working to break the “cone of silence” that the Biden administration has placed over Afghanistan to obscure the consequences of our retreat.Neither Ms. Nauert nor Colonel Mann, a Green Beret and combat veteran of the war, see this work as political. Nor, Ms. Nauert stresses, is their concern to criticize President Biden. Rather it’s a “moral” one, with an eye for national security. Theirs is one of a dozen or so volunteer groups working — independently of the government — via the Moral Compass Federation. These groups provide housing, food, medical care, and advocacy on Capitol Hill.This help goes to those whose “lives have been devastated by being left behind with seemingly no verifiable path to safety,” one advocacy group, the Association of Wartime Allies, has reported. Colonel Mann and Ms. Nauert are among those relying on their past connections to move former Afghan allies from one safe house to another in an effort to bide time and save lives. Yet, they report, Washington won’t lift a finger. It was as early as March 2021, Colonel Mann recalled, that he realized that Afghans were going to be left behind in the Biden evacuation plan. The evacuee list omitted American-trained Afghans who fought with us against the Taliban. “In many cases we, the veteran community, had individuals on buses, outside the gates of Karzai International Airport with engines running,” Colonel Mann said, “and no one would open the gates.” He managed, however, to get one such warrior past the gate of the Kabul airport compound by telling a former American colleague that the Afghan soldier would use a password, “pineapple.” The man was saved, and afterward Colonel Mann and other war veterans set up “Task Force Pineapple” to help others out. Yet these volunteer rescue efforts get little to no help from the Pentagon, or the administration. Senior Washington aides are similarly frustrated as their bosses refuse to help Afghans and a few Americans who were left behind for various reasons and are now hunted down by the Taliban. “Scott and I both received calls from people at the highest level of the Department of Defense and the State Department, who worked directly for the secretaries, asking us for help,” Ms. Nauert said.At one point, Colonel Mann recalled, Vice President Harris’s military aide phoned him to ask for help in getting an ally out. He reported receiving similar calls from the chief of the Air force, as well as top officials at the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the intelligence community. “Now, you tell me how that works,” Colonel Mann said, adding “there is no way” veterans can handle this task alone, unless they’re helped by Washington. It is amazing that top administration officials are turning to private operators to rescue our country’s allies, while keeping the cone of silence over the larger issue. “I speak with reporters every day,” says Ms. Nauert. She stays in contact with top Washington journalists, some of whose fixers and colleagues were left behind. “They will say, ‘we so badly want to tell this story, but our editors don’t care, or they won’t let us,’” she said. It’s a shocking and stirring human drama. Yet there are limits to what the press — and concerned volunteers, no matter how zealous — can do to rescue America’s brothers-in-arms left behind. And not only brothers-in-arms. Clerical, medical, educational allies have been abandoned as well. Where is the sense of responsibility among the political leadership in the White House, State Department, Pentagon, and Congress?It happens that this isn’t the first or even second time that we’ve seen this kind of crisis. We remember the “boat people” and others who fled the communist conquests of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. We remember how in June 1979, as the Group of Seven nations was preparing to meet at Tokyo, the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal issued its editorial calling for the summit to put the boat people atop its agenda.“A Job for the Summit” was reprinted in America, where it was seen by President Carter — who, God bless him, ordered the summit agenda to move the Indochina refugee crisis to the top. That led to America taking as many as 1.3 million refugees from Indochina. Canada and Australia took 200,000 each, France 100,000, and Britain nearly 25,000. Even Israel took some. The refugees were a boon to every country that received them.We are currently watching a heroic scramble of Poland and other neighbors of Ukraine to make room, if only temporarily, for refugees from Ukraine — and millions of them. How is it possible that our own political leadership cannot step up in respect of the Afghans who stood with, and worked with and sometimes fought with us during the war against the Taliban? It’s time, in our view, to break the cone of silence._________This editorial was expanded from the bulldog edition.

Afghanistan: Breaking the Cone of Silence

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