Jill Biden Hampered Afghanistan Evacuation With Special Requests – Opinion

While the disaster in Afghanistan that happened in 2021 has been forgotten, its effects still linger. The Biden administration continues to try and clean up after the disaster in Afghanistan, 2021, that resulted from the deaths of 13 American soldiers as well as countless Afghans.

Women and children are being starved in staggering numbers due to this haphazard withdrawal. The President is moving now to issue an executive directive that will freeze Afghan Central Bank funds for humanitarian relief.

BREAKING: President Biden is expected to issue an executive order to move some $7 billion of the Afghan central bank’s assets frozen in the U.S. banking system to fund humanitarian relief in Afghanistan and compensate Sept. 11 victims, source tells @AP https://t.co/pSimEOz9vR

— The Associated Press (@AP) February 11, 2022

This order has obvious problems. Taliban are terrorist organizations disguised as legitimate governments. All money that is sent to the country will be used and stolen for criminal activities. As to giving compensation to the 9/11 victims’ families, that feels like a rather convenient throw-in as Democrats face electoral doom in November.

However, it is still important to ask how this happened. A recent U.S. Army report lays a lot of blame for the disastrous decisions made by the Biden Administration during that time. It was expected that Joe Biden would reject its conclusions, however, the report does contain a fascinating mention of Jill Biden.

Per the testimony of Navy Admiral Peter Vasely, who was running the operations center at Kabul’s airport during the evacuation, the First Lady and others were making special requests that ultimately ate up “bandwidth” and hampered the mission.

An admiral for the U.S. Navy claimed “high-profile” requests, including one from first lady Jill Biden, caused disruption to overall Afghanistan evacuation efforts last year…

…”That’s accurate,” ​Vasley said when asked in sworn testimony for the report whether Pope Francis and First Lady Jill Biden intervened in evacuation efforts to request help on behalf of others.

“I was being contacted by representatives from the Holy See to assist the Italian military contingent … in getting through groups … of special interest to the Vatican,” he said. “That is just one of many examples.​”​

“I cannot stress enough​ ​how these high-profile requests ate up bandwidth and created competition for already stressed resources​,” Vasley added.

What the exact request was from Jill Biden isn’t disclosed, but we can reasonably ascertain that it had something to do with prioritizing a certain person or group of people for evacuation.

You could consider such a request to be made in good faith in a vacuum. Yes, many people in Afghanistan deserved to evacuate. But that doesn’t mean that it’s appropriate for the First Lady, who holds no elected office and has no actual role to play in the government, to get involved in a military operation.

It was completely out of bounds for Jill Biden to put that kind of pressure on military leaders, who likely wanted to do their best to fulfill her request — given her husband is the president. That’s the danger in abusing relationships that include varying power dynamics. The First Lady’s move in this instance had negative consequences for real, causing chaos and disruption to an otherwise chaotic operation.

Think about what this report would look like if it were Melania Trump. Would the media respond? I’d suggest this would be a full-blown scandal, no matter what the motivation behind the request was. Jill Biden’s rights are protected, however. It is a Democrat after all. Still, there’s something really unsettling about a First Lady who is so comfortable stepping outside the chain of command to make demands of those who do not answer to her.

There was enough for the military to be concerned about in that turbulent time. Jill Biden’s interference in the matter only created unnecessary confusion and wasted valuable resources. That’s not my opinion. Rather, that’s the conclusion of the U.S. Army, and it should be taken seriously, not dismissed out of hand by the president.