GOP Reps Sound Off on the Five-Year Anniversary of Abbey Gate
This story raises questions about governance, accountability, and American values.
Five years on and the image that still sticks is the chaos at the perimeter, families being crushed against concertina wire, Marines pulling babies over concrete barriers because there was no functioning process to do it any other way. Thirteen dead. Not from some unforeseeable black swan event, but from a withdrawal that intelligence officials, generals, and plenty of people watching from the outside could see going sideways in real time.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
It’s the five-year anniversary of one of Joe Biden’s greatest failures, which left 13 American service members dead in Kabul, Afghanistan, in August 2021. The airport was a mess, chaos reigned, and a terrorist attack was coming.
It capped off the shambolic and ignominious departure of American forces from the country, as the Taliban, whom the Biden administration thought weren’t a factor, or at the very least lacked the capability, to retake the capital.
Wrong. Not shocking for a man who’s been incorrect on every major American foreign policy endeavor for the past forty years.
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
Five years on and the image that still sticks is the chaos at the perimeter, families being crushed against concertina wire, Marines pulling babies over concrete barriers because there was no functioning process to do it any other way. Thirteen dead. Not from some unforeseeable black swan event, but from a withdrawal that intelligence officials, generals, and plenty of people watching from the outside could see going sideways in real time. The administration had months of warning and somehow still managed to hand Bagram over before Kabul fell, which is the kind of decision that looks worse, not better, with five years of hindsight.
What's remarkable is how little accountability actually attached to any of it. Nobody got fired. Nobody resigned. The official line settled into "the withdrawal was overdue and messy things happen," as if messy and fatal are the same category of problem. Families of the fallen have spent years asking for a level of candor from the Pentagon and the White House that never really arrived, and that silence has aged into its own kind of scandal.
Anniversaries like this tend to get treated as ceremonial, a moment for statements and wreaths, and then everyone moves on until next August. That's not enough. The lesson of Abbey Gate isn't just that withdrawals are hard. It's that when the people running foreign policy refuse to plan for the worst case, the worst case shows up anyway, and it's eighteen and twenty year olds who pay for it. That bill never gets sent to the people who wrote it.
The Gold Star families deserve more than a news cycle every August. They deserve an actual reckoning, and five years without one is its own answer about how seriously Washington takes the men and women it sends overseas.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.