Exclusive — Rep. Lee Zeldin: Americans in Afghanistan Can’t Get to Kabul by Joe Biden’s August 31 Deadline

Americans in Afghanistan cannot reach Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul before the August 31 deadline set by the Biden administration, Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) said on Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

Zeldin remarked, “The U.S. government is telling Americans in Afghanistan, ‘You have to get yourself to the airport in Kabul. You have to do that by August 31st. If you can get to the airport, then we’ll get you home,’ but the problem is that you can’t get Americans to the airport by August 31st.”

He continued, “The head-scratcher there is that [the Biden administration] made this decision to withdraw, and it decided to do it in a way that makes little sense, like vacating Bagram [Air Base], pulling our military out before [evacuating] all these Americans.”

On Wednesday, Biden committed that the U.S. will keep troops in Afghanistan beyond the August 31 deadline if such a step is needed to get Americans out of the country, and that if the evacuation of Afghanistan is not completed by the end of August, the U.S. will see who is left, and if there are “American citizens left, we’re going to stay until we get them all out.”

Zeldin, who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and related subcommittees, said President Joe Biden’s recent description of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan as “highly unlikely” was contrary to years of assessment he had received from officials in the Department of Defense and intelligence apparatus.

He said “every estimate” he received from the national security apparatus assessed the likelihood of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan as “something other than ‘highly unlikely.'”