The Whitewash of the Massacre at Abbey Gate

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, August 09, 2023

 

By August 26, 2021, NATO’s hasty withdrawal of service personnel from Afghanistan’s last viable point of egress — Kabul’s civilian airport — had already devolved into nightmarish chaos. Wave after wave of panicked Afghan citizens descended on the airport, sometimes cascading over its protective walls, where they were herded into overcrowded pens and sewage trenches and overseen by the handful of service personnel left to manage the West’s escape.

 

At the time, President Joe Biden assured nervous observers of the disorder that the Taliban, which had recaptured Kabul just eleven days earlier, would provide security for the evacuees. Those guarantees proved insufficient to prevent one of the worst-case scenarios. At 5:50 p.m. local time, a suicide bomber waded through the crowd at Abbey Gate and detonated an explosive belt, killing 13 American soldiers and wounding 45 more U.S. personnel. At least another 170 Afghan civilians also died in the attack.

 

The Biden administration has affirmed in a variety of retrospective reports on the incident that it was little more than an unavoidable tragedy. An “After Action Review” released by the State Department in June conceded, “The airport gates were filled with potential dangers due to large, uncontrolled crowds and constant threats from ISIS-K and the Taliban,” and rather unhelpfully added that the deadly terrorist event those conditions facilitated only “underscored how dangerous the situation was.” Truly searing insight there.

 

This assessment does not improve on the Pentagon’s assertion in February 2022 that the attack at Abbey Gate was inevitable. “Based upon our investigation, at the tactical level this was not preventable,” Brigadier General Lance Curtis told reporters. In his assessment, U.S. service personnel followed all proper procedures, pausing the processing of evacuees when necessary and closing the gates in a timely manner.

 

Pentagon investigators “found that military leadership on the ground was appropriately engaged in force protection measures throughout the operation of Abbey Gate,” according to the Defense Department’s summary of its own report. The very nature of the operation, however, put American soldiers at risk. “This is close-up work,” said U.S. CentCom chief general Frank McKenzie of the effort to screen and approve evacuees. “The breath of the person you are searching is upon you.”

 

But the Gold Star families who spoke out at Issa’s event in Escondido, Calif., this week are not convinced.

 

“To say it’s time to move on and there’s nothing more to be said as to the planning and the execution of how our country wrapped a two-decade war, is an insult to all of us,” said the mother of Marine corporal Hunter Lopez. “When our leaders, including the Secretary of Defense and our commander in chief called this evacuation a success, as if there should be celebration, it is like a knife in the heart for our families and for the people who came back and for every service member that served over this 20-year war,” Marine sergeant Nicole Gee’s grieving mother-in-law told attendees. “I want the answers,” Marine corporal Humberto Sanchez’s mother demanded. “I want the truth. I want to go to sleep knowing my son did not die in vain. I want to know that this failure will not happen again.”

 

These could easily be written off as expressions of raw emotion, but the grieving families have every reason to believe that the full story of what happened at Abbey Gate has not yet been told.

 

The Pentagon’s exculpatory final report contradicts the assessments offered by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the time of the attack at the gate. Fewer than 24 hours prior to that deadly bombing, Austin instructed Defense Department leaders to prepare for an imminent “mass casualty event.” That heightened state of alert was justified by what Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said was “significant” intelligence indicating that Afghanistan’s ISIS affiliate had prepared to mount a “complex attack” on NATO forces and their Afghan allies. “I don’t believe people get the incredible amount of risk on the ground,” Austin said at the time.

 

On March 8 of this year, House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul led hearings into the events that culminated in the attack at Abbey Gate. Marine sergeant Tyler Vargas-Andrews testified at that hearing, and he told the committee that he believes the attack that took two of his limbs may not have been as unavoidable as the Pentagon claims.

 

“Countless Afghans were murdered by the Taliban 155 yards in front of our position,” Vargas-Andrews said of the conduct in which the Taliban was engaged just feet away from U.S. soldiers. “We communicated the atrocities to our chain of command and intel assets, but nothing came of it.” On August 22, 2021, Vargas-Andrews said he told his superiors that he observed enemy assets conducting a test run of an IED attack on the airport. He said he later received intelligence relating to IED threats and a description of an aspiring suicide bomber and his associate — a description that precisely matched two figures whom Vargas-Andrews encountered hours before the fateful attack on August 26. He requested permission to engage the targets. “The response,” he said, was that “leadership did not have the engagement authority for us. [They told us], ‘Do not engage.'” The suspect individuals soon disappeared in the crowd. “To this day, we believe he was the suicide bomber,” Vargas-Andrews lamented. “Our expertise was disregarded. No one was held accountable for our safety.”

 

Vargas-Andrews’s allegations are serious, and they remain unaddressed by the Pentagon or the State Department. Vargas-Andrews and his fellow service personnel have every right to be frustrated with the Biden administration’s senior leadership, particularly given the flippancy with which they have regarded the notion that anything could have been done differently to prevent this disaster.

 

Of course, the disaster that occurred on August 26, 2021, was preventable. As Army Command sergeant major Jacob Smith told House investigators, the soldiers and civilians who died at Abbey Gate would have survived that day if the Biden administration had not made the incomprehensible decision to reduce America’s footprint in Afghanistan down to a skeleton force such that it could no longer hold Bagram Airbase. “The events that happened at Abbey Gate, I believe that would not have occurred at Bagram,” Smith said in June. “The defenses that Bagram held [with] the ability to see for hundreds of meters and the defense in depth of its control points — I do not believe the result would have been the same.”

 

That’s the long and short of it. Joe Biden’s stubborn insistence on maintaining as small an American presence as possible in Afghanistan ahead of the withdrawal date his White House negotiated with the Taliban created the conditions for a national humiliation culminating in the deaths of 13 U.S. soldiers. It was a preventable debacle, and there has not yet been a full public accounting of on-the-record claims that the suicide bomber who killed scores of Americans and Afghans could have been neutralized.

 

“These deaths were preventable,” Sergeant Gee’s mother-in-law mourned. “My daughter could be with us today.” America deserves to know for certain if she is right.

 

ADDENDUM: Voters in Ohio went to the polls on Tuesday to vote in a statewide referendum on a proposal that would have raised the threshold to amend the state’s constitution in future plebiscites from a simple majority to 60 percent of the vote. That proposal went down to defeat, and it wasn’t especially close.

 

As of this writing, 57 percent of Ohio’s voters disapproved of the measure while just 43 percent backed it. Nor was this lazy mid-summer election a low-turnout affair. The votes of over 3 million Ohioans have already been counted, which is only about 1 million fewer votes than both U.S. Senate candidates received in last year’s midterm election.

 

You would think that anyone exposed to an elementary civic education would favor a measure that makes it harder to amend a constitution. After all, constitutions should be hard to amend. But neither the pro- nor the anti-referendum camps framed this ballot initiative in those terms.

 

Democrats and liberals who opposed the measure argued that the referendum was a proxy for abortion, and pro-life maximalists would use the higher threshold to thwart an upcoming vote on a proposed constitutional amendment that would establish an individual right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions.” Indeed, some Republicans agreed with Democrats, such as Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who called yesterday’s referendum an up-or-down vote “on abortion.” But most Republicans tried to persuade Ohio’s voters that the move was a necessary prophylactic against the efforts of outside interests to manipulate them and, thus, their state’s politics. That slightly condescending messaging strategy failed.

 

Ohio is not exactly unfriendly terrain for pro-life activism. Ohio governor Mike DeWine signed a ban on the practice after six weeks of gestation in 2019, and he handily won his reelection last year. Something similar could be said of Kansas, where voters rejected a similar ballot measure to alter its constitution in order to preclude protections on abortion rights last year. Perhaps the upshot here is that voters want to reserve the right to change their minds and express that change of heart in elections rather than seeing their options limited by alterations to the state’s charter. Regardless, the strategy adopted by pro-life advocacy groups in the anarchic post-Dobbs environment isn’t working.