On Monday, a surprising voice emerged accusing the State Department of being the reason why six planes carrying 19 Americans and 40 Special Immigration Visa holders were unable to leave Mazar-i-Sharif International Airport.  Tuesday, the State Department stands accused of falsely taking credit for four Americans having successfully escaped Afghanistan.  These reports are a perfect metaphor for the entire Biden administration: incompetent, dishonest, and vainglorious.

Monica Showalter wrote that the State Department and the Biden administration are apparently working with the Taliban to block private rescue flights from leaving Afghanistan.  On Monday, that story got support from an unexpected source.

David Rohde, an executive editor of newyorker.com, The New Yorker's online site, is no friend to conservatives.  Nevertheless, Rohde told Fox News something he hasn't covered in his own leftist outlet:

"I want to repeat that," he said. "It is the State Department and the White House" holding up the planes. He said the civilian effort has been "far more ambitious, far more dynamic and far more successful than what the administration has been doing."

The latest report about State is that it's falsely taking credit for the efforts of other people to facilitate the escape from Taliban country.  An American mom and her three children had a harrowing experience traveling overland to get to an American embassy.  With the family safely within the embassy's walls, the State Department boasted:

The State Department said it "facilitated the safe departure" of four U.S. citizens from Afghanistan on Monday, noting that the Taliban "was aware" and did not interfere in the evacuation.

A senior State Department official said the evacuation was done "by overland route from Afghanistan."

"Embassy staff was present upon their arrival," the official said. "They were in good condition."

The official said that the "Taliban was aware and did not impede their transit."

The problem is that every one of these statements is a lie.  According to Fox News, a woman named Mariam was trapped in Kabul with her three children, aged two to fifteen.  All four are American citizens.  They had a harrowing escape, one in which the State Department played no role.  Instead, with funding from private donors, Cory Mills and his team of military veterans made their escape possible.

The Mills team learned about Mariam and her children from Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) and immediately began the long, dangerous process of rescuing them.  The first and most obvious way to get them out was on the government flights leaving the Kabul airport, when the State Department was still urging Americans to go there to be evacuated.

Mariam and the children tried to get to the airport several times, which meant passing through Taliban checkpoints, but were always turned back.  They stopped trying after a Taliban man aimed a pistol at Mariam's head, saying they should leave the area and not return.

The Taliban started actively hunting for Mariam, but the Mills team was able to get her and the kids to a safehouse.  When they were unable to leave via the planes at Mazar-i-Sharif, the Mills team got the four Americans into a neighboring country (name withheld to keep that door open for future rescues) and, finally, to an American embassy.

After 2 weeks & multiple life threatening attempts, I am overjoyed to share that 4 U.S. citizens from #TX13 were part of the first successful ground evacuation since the U.S. left Kabul. Thank you to Cory Mills & the other patriots on his team for saving these BRAVE Americans! pic.twitter.com/1Tv9KRUgcE

— Ronny Jackson (@RepRonnyJackson) September 6, 2021

With the scary, hard, dangerous work out of the way, the State Department stepped in to get some borrowed glory:

The State Department's public posture about Mariam's rescue is "absolute nonsense," Mills told Fox News in an exclusive interview Monday. "The fact that they're spinning this, trying to take 100% credit when they didn't track this family, when they placated this family, when the mother, who was under extreme stress and extreme pressure, reached out to the State Department multiple times and got no help."

[snip]

"This is an attempt to save face by the administration for the Americans they left behind. This is a woman with three children from age 15 all the way down to two-years-old. And they did nothing to try to expedite this… But at the very last minute you have these 'senior officials' at the State Department trying to claim credit for this like 'oh yeah look what we've done,'" Mills said.

"It's like we carried the ball to the 99-and-a-half yard line and them taking it that last half yard and being like 'look what we did.'"

There's a raging debate about whether the Biden administration's performance in Afghanistan results from incompetence, stupidity, cowardice, and groupthink, on the one hand, or is a deliberate plan to degrade America's might and reputation, with all the benefits flowing to China, on the other.  The one thing that's certain is that this administration is a disgrace that should see every person involved publicly humiliated and fired with pensions withheld, and with some probably deserving long prison terms.

Image: Mariam, her family, and her rescuers.  Twitter screen grab.

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