Photo : Collected
US State Department official James DeHart told lawmakers that diplomats created Afghanistan evacuation plans from scratch after the collapse of the country’s government in Kabul in August 2021, according to a transcribed interview released Thursday (4 April).
DeHart, who previously served as US Assistant Chief of Mission to Afghanistan and assisted in evacuation efforts, told the US House Foreign Affairs Committee that the State Department was not following any pre-planned protocols during its efforts to evacuate people from Afghanistan.
“For the part of the evacuation that the State Department was so heavily involved in, we had to, I would say, create from scratch tactical operations that would get our priority people into the airport,” DeHart said in the June 2023 interview.
DeHart said he could not speak for whether the US military was following a specific evacuation plan.
Nobody predicted the situation that Afghanistan faced in August 2021, when the Taliban (under UN sanctions) took over the country, DeHart said.
The United States’ military withdrawal and evacuation from Afghanistan culminated in airlifts out of Kabul International Airport. During the evacuations, a terrorist attack by the Islamic State-Khorasan terror group (banned in Russia) resulted in the deaths of 13 US soldiers and 170 Afghan civilians.
Messenger/Mumu
