***To read the full blog, please check out the complete post on NewsBusters***
A week after the fall of Afghanistan, and the response from the Biden administration was floundering as thousands of Americans were still trapped in Kabul and other places in the country. With the State Department telling Americans they needed to brave the streets and the Taliban in order to get to the airport and home, ABC’s Martha Raddatz pressed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Sunday’s This Week in an effort to find out why the world’s most capable military was not trying to save its people.
Raddatz’s first question regarded the administration’s adherence to sticking with the arbitrary August 31 deadline and if they planned to stay beyond that date to save Americans. Austin was disturbingly non-committal:
We're going to try our very best to get everybody, every American citizen, who wants to get out, out. And we continue to look at different ways to – and creative ways to reach out and contact American citizens and help them get into the airfield.
The way the administration was saying they were helping the Americans “who want to get out” made it sound as though they planned broadly deem anyone not at the airport by that time as wanting to stay. Austin added credence to this fear after he refused to say if President Biden would be willing to extend the timeframe.
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