Marine Corps Cpl. Greg Whalen peered across barbed wire, overlooking chaos below the wall. He was guarding Hamid Karzai International Airport, days before America withdrew its last troops from Afghanistan.
“We’ve got thousands of people outside,” Whalen said to The Federalist. “We had to keep it closed and maintain control.”
The Afghanistan withdrawal marks its three-year anniversary on Aug. 30. The disastrous exit left as many as 9,000 Americans in Afghanistan, according to a 2022 report, along with $7 billion of military equipment for the Taliban. An ISIS suicide bomber killed 13 American service members and hundreds of Afghans outside the airport in the closing days of the withdrawal.
“I’m not going to say, ‘It is Joe Biden’s fault.’ It’s way more complicated than that,” Whalen said. “But all of them together as a group? Somebody should have held somebody accountable.”
Not a single senior official has resigned or been fired in the three years since the calamity, as The Federalist previously reported.
The purpose of the withdrawal was clear, according to Whalen, but how to accomplish it and how the situation became so dire seemed like a “mystery.” He noted he was simply giving his opinion.
“The fact that it got to the situation that it was, and we weren’t even called to go in and do anything until basically two weeks before the deadline, is insane,” Whalen said. “There are videos of people clinging to planes and falling from the sky because they’re so desperate to get out.
