The chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan four years ago left a lasting stain on our national security and continues to produce dangerous consequences on American soil. This piece looks at recent arrests and an attack tied to evacuees, the vetting failures that made them possible, and why stricter standards are essential to protect our communities and our troops.
The withdrawal was a national humiliation that betrayed the men and women who served for nearly two decades. It was rushed, which turned a complex military and humanitarian operation into a gamble with our country’s safety. That gamble has paid out in consequences that keep showing up here at home.
In Texas, an Afghan national who came to the United States during the post-withdrawal resettlement was charged with threatening to build a bomb, launch a suicide attack, and murder Americans and “infidels.” This arrest is not an isolated incident, but part of a string of troubling cases tied to evacuees who arrived without proper vetting. Every time a new case appears, it reinforces the underlying failure of how the evacuation was handled.
The brutal attack on two members of the West Virginia National Guard in Washington, D.C. showed how immediate and personal the danger can be. U.S. Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom and U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe were left to suffer because screening and resettlement procedures failed. My prayers are with their families, fellow troops, and Staff Sgt. Wolfe as he fights to recover.
This horror was preventable. Many of the Afghan nationals brought here during the withdrawal were processed in the chaos of evacuation flights rather than through careful, months-long screening. As I wrote at the time, “There is no doubt that we can’t trust some of the people who made it on evacuation flights in the chaos. … Proper vetting takes months. Vetting during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan took place over hours, days or weeks; in some cases, it didn’t happen at all. This is an entirely inadequate and reckless way to screen people from a country with poor recordkeeping and a long history of extremism and terrorism.”
President Donald Trump warned about the predictable fallout of a rapid exit. “The consequences of a rapid exit are both predictable and unacceptable,” Trump said during remarks presenting his strategy for Afghanistan on August 21, 2017. He continued, “As we know, in 2011, America hastily and mistakenly withdrew from Iraq. As a result, our hard-won gains slipped back into the hands of terrorist enemies. Our soldiers watched as cities they had fought for, and bled to liberate, and won, were occupied by a terrorist group called ISIS. The vacuum we created by leaving too soon gave safe haven for ISIS to spread, to grow, recruit, and launch attacks. We cannot repeat in Afghanistan the mistake our leaders made in Iraq.”
We also made a grave operational mistake by treating vetting for battlefield partners the same as vetting for resettlement in American communities. The standards to work with our military and our intelligence services are not the same as the standards for coming to live among us. That mismatch turned a security problem into a domestic one.
Numbers tell the story: more than 190,000 Afghan nationals have resettled in the United States since the withdrawal, and in the months immediately after the evacuation, over 70,000 entered without the necessary background checks. A Department of Defense inspector general review later found the administration failed to use an essential biometric database to vet evacuees properly, and a retroactive Army review uncovered “potentially significant security concerns,” including fingerprints on improvised explosive devices and individuals known or suspected to be terrorists.
These evacuations were a reckless rush to mask a political failure, not a secure resettlement plan. The recent violence and arrests should be a wake-up call: we need stricter vetting, real accountability, and policy changes that protect Americans without apologizing for insisting on safety. We owe that to our service members, to families across the country, and to the idea that America must prioritize security first when admitting newcomers.
