State Department accuses Trump administration of failing to save Afghan partners

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Former President Donald Trump’s attempt to deprive refugee programs of needed resources has contributed to the abandonment of thousands of Afghan nationals who worked for the United States, according to a senior State Department official.

We prioritized this program, a program that was left in a sadly run-down state by the previous administration, State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters. So it was a program that, literally from the start, we prioritized. We started from a state of decrepitude and became a program that worked much more effectively.

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Secretary of State Antony Blinkens’ team acknowledged that the majority of Afghan nationals eligible, because of their work for the US government, for a special issue visa to the United States were being left behind. State Department reports on the complexity of the evacuation effort have failed to allay the frustrations of critics of the administration, including among private sector charities linked to the evacuation effort. evacuation.

The United States has been planning to withdraw from Afghanistan for some time, Cordelia Revells, Jewish Family Services of Seattles, Cordelia Revells, who manages the refugee portfolio of nonprofit groups, told the Washington Examiner. This should have been incorporated into the withdrawal plans.

Price cited a 2020 State Department monitoring report that found a major bottleneck in reviewing SIV applications, causing the understaffed program to take so long to process. claims that refugee advocates have filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of Afghan nationals. .

And you can see the efficiencies we’ve been able to achieve, added Price. In March of this year, we were processing approximately 100 SIV requests per week. As of mid-August of this year, we were processing a thousand SIV requests per week.

Yet President Joe Bidens’ announcement that he would withdraw US forces from Afghanistan came in April, much closer to the start of this SIV program streamlining effort than to the end.

These are the people who supported our mission in Afghanistan throughout our time there, Revells observed. And this evacuation phase should have been planned. That shouldn’t have been left to that last 10-day scramble.

Biden has stipulated that US troops will leave before 9/11, but Pentagon officials have privately rushed out even earlier than that in the hope that unexpected speed would minimize the vulnerability of the retreating forces.

When we still had a chance, I called on this administration to come back on the offensive, reset the chessboard … regain our influence, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Republican from Texas and former Navy SEAL who, told reporters. was injured in Afghanistan earlier this week. . “They said no. They wanted to stick to their arbitrary surrender deadline, and they left.

As they left, Taliban forces swept the country, believing Bidens’ predictions that the Afghan military and police would resist their offensive.

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We were able to save over a year on average processing time, Price insisted. If we had the time that pretty much everyone is waiting for, you can see how those gains would be. [have been] quite valuable. These gains will be very valuable, however, as many of them are still relevant to the ongoing SIV treatment.

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