Army National Guard veteran Alek Skarlatos believes the Biden administration failed the American citizens and Afghan allies now stuck in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan by mishandling the U.S. military’s exit from Bagram Airfield.
Skarlatos, an Oregon Republican who gained attention for his role in stopping a terrorist attack on a Paris-bound train exactly six years ago, on August 21, 2015, spoke to Breitbart News Saturday on the anniversary date about what he perceived to be President Joe Biden’s “colossal” withdrawal failure in Afghanistan.
“I’m sure at this point everybody realizes that this is a colossal failure, militarily and just from common sense,” Skarlatos said. “I think what we should’ve done, just because Bagram Airfield is the biggest base we had in Afghanistan and it had a secure perimeter — it wasn’t in the middle of Kabul like the Kabul airport is — so we should’ve consolidated all of our men, equipment, and allies to Bagram, and then we would’ve been able to process them there before pulling our military out and before basically being forced to flee the country by the Taliban.”
Listen:
Skarlatos, who was stationed in Bagram for nine months, continued, “Right now, we’ve got people trapped basically behind enemy lines that are Americans that we still haven’t gotten out, and if we just consolidated everything to Bagram we would’ve been able to pull out with whatever timeline we wanted, because the Taliban still could’ve taken the entire country and we would’ve still been able to secure Bagram.”
The Pentagon said during a briefing Saturday it had evacuated 2,500 American citizens out of as many as 15,000 left in the country. Biden had previously confirmed up to 15,000 were left in Afghanistan in an interview with ABC News this week.
Biden in April announced a symbolic end date of September 11 to withdraw the final U.S. troops from Afghanistan after the U.S. had been present in the country for 20 years. The president later pushed ahead that date to the end of August amid the Taliban making new advances through Afghanistan in July.
Even still, the president at that time expressed confidence to the American public that a Taliban takeover was “highly unlikely” and that the Afghan government “clearly has the capacity to sustain the government in place.”
Last weekend, however, the Taliban, in a fast-paced surge, seized control of the capital city of Kabul. The Pentagon began an evacuation mission out of the Kabul airport, but concerns quickly arose for American citizens and Afghan refugees left in the country.
Pentagon press secretary John Kirby declined during the Saturday briefing to detail any intelligence he had about “the threat environment” in the area surrounding the airport after the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan issued an alert Saturday morning of “potential security threats outside the gates at the Kabul airport.” The security alert went on to discourage American citizens from traveling to the U.S. airport unless they had been individually instructed otherwise by the U.S. government.
Afghans gather on a roadside near the military part of the airport in Kabul on August 20, 2021, hoping to flee from the country after the Taliban’s military takeover of Afghanistan. (Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images)
Skarlatos believes the leadup to the tumultuous week was “so terribly mismanaged” by the Biden administration.
“We still had time to fix this before [the Taliban took over Kabul], and we didn’t, and we even watched as the Taliban took over bases like Bagram and seized all these weapons, ammunition, vehicles, airplanes, even helicopters, and that was still an opportunity to fly a plane over, drop a bomb and at least blow up the equipment to deny Taliban access to it, and we didn’t even do that much,” Skarlatos said. “So we dropped the ball in just about every way possible, and even now… we’re like six days deep and we have no plan to get American citizens out. We have no plan to expand the security perimeter outside the Kabul airport and we have no plan — at least today — to take back Bagram Airfield and evacuate people in a manner that is actually effective and efficient and we could actually get this done maybe in a week or two, but either way, we needed to do those things and then not have an artificial deadline and just pull out and just say good luck to everybody else that we’re leaving behind.”
Skarlatos is making his second run for Congress next year in Oregon’s Fourth Congressional District. The former national guardsman is seeking to unseat Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) — who has held his position for more than 30 years — after he came within single digits of beating DeFazio during his first bid for office in 2020.
Write to Ashley Oliver at aoliver@breitbart.com.