(PresidentialWire.com)- Last weekend, Senator Tom Cotton tweeted a message to Americans stranded in Afghanistan, telling them to contact his office immediately and his office would do “everything in our power” to “help get you out.”
Cotton appeared on the Ruthless Podcast Tuesday morning in which he told the hosts that within 48 hours of posting that notice, his office was flooded with hundreds of calls from Americans asking for help to get to the Kabul airport.
Cotton said that at the very least he is willing to make sure that these Americans were heard and someone has logged their name, phone number and location “in case they turn up missing.”
Some of the callers told Cotton’s office of State Department servers crashing or its hotline numbers being overwhelmed.
Calling the implementation of Biden’s decision to withdraw “really unbelievable,” Cotton expressed frustration at what he called “the scale of the incompetence here.”
How many Americans got caught in the net is unclear. During a press briefing on Monday, State Department spokesman Ned Price said that the total number of Americans stranded when Kabul fell is “not a tally that we keep in the context of Afghanistan or any other country.” However, it is estimated that approximately ten thousand Americans were trapped in Afghanistan.
Six days after the fall of Kabul, US officials reported that only 2,500 of those Americans have been evacuated.
Senator Cotton, who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, told the Ruthless podcast that he couldn’t understand why the Biden administration chose to bug out of Bagram Air Base over six weeks ago and evacuate US military before evacuating American civilians. Instead, thousands of Americans have been told to shelter in place and contact the State Department.
“I mean, the last thing you would think you would turn over is your secure airbase,” Cotton explained, adding that the last person to leave should be “the four-star commander and his troops.” Cotton argued that the only remaining job of the troops was to secure “and orderly and well-organized exit from the country.”
One Afghan/American couple who had repeatedly tried and failed to get to the airport, called Senator Cotton’s office and were given the name of the contact at the airport military barricade. And on Wednesday they were finally able to get into the airport and onto a plane.
