The Biden administration has told Congress that 300 American citizens were still in Afghanistan following August’s U.S. troop withdrawal, or triple the number the State Department had been publicly claiming, according to Sen. Ben Sasse.
The Nebraska Republican dubbed it a “slow-motion hostage crisis” and demanded President Biden ramp up efforts to rescue those abandoned amid the chaos of the August troop pullout and airlift.
“For weeks, their official number was ‘about a hundred’ and it magically never changed — as Americans slowly got out, the total number never went down. Now they say more than 300 Americans are still in Afghanistan,” Mr. Sasse said.
News reports say nearly 200 of the 300 still in Afghanistan have been trying to leave the country.
That’s in addition to more than 200 who have managed to escape in the weeks since the end of the U.S. war effort.
Adding those in, it means there were some 500 Americans left, and about 400 who wanted to get out, at the beginning of September, at a time when the government said the number was about 100.
“The Biden administration lied to hide the consequences of the president’s morally indefensible decision to abandon our people in a war zone,” Mr. Sasse said.
State Department spokesman Ned Price is expected to address the updated tally of Americans still in Afghanistan at his Friday afternoon briefing. The spokesman tweeted out Thursday night that the “number of U.S. citizens and [lawful permanent residents] we assist is dynamic as we review manifests, receive reports from colleagues in the field, and assist with departures.”
Mr. Biden was carrying out a withdrawal set in motion by the Trump administration, though the current president set the final timetable to leave. The Taliban insurgency stormed through the country in August, ousting the government and taking control of Kabul, the capital, far more quickly than U.S. officials thought possible.
That left Mr. Biden scrambling to send in more troops to hold the main international airport and try to fly out as many Americans and Afghan allies as possible.
U.S. officials say more than 120,000 people were evacuated by air in the final weeks, though most were Afghans, and it’s not clear exactly how they earned their spots on the flights.