Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), who was one of the members of Congress who traveled to Kabul before the U.S. military pulled out, told MSNBC on Wednesday said the Americans who are left stranded in Afghanistan are in an extreme amount of danger.
Moulton, who served in the Marine Corps, stressed those who were left behind tried to leave while the U.S. military was conducting evacuations but were unable to get inside Hamid Karzai International Airport before the self-imposed deadline of August 31.
"I heard a report of a teacher who was there ostensibly to help educate Afghans, didn’t find a way to the airport. As you said, it was incredibly chaotic. There are great stories of the Taliban letting people through. There are also many tragic stories I’ve heard of the Taliban stopping people from getting to the airport," Moulton said.
"It sounds like that’s what happened to this teacher. And so he’s stuck there and he doesn’t know how we’re going to get him out. And our responsibility in Washington is to have a plan for that. It’s to have a plan for where we go forward and the number one first step is to get these Americans and the Afghan allies that we left behind out to freedom and safety, because many of them have a price on their heads," he continued.
Part of the problem now is due to all American military assets being pulled out of the country, the U.S. State Department has to negotiate with the Taliban to get them to allow Americans and Afghans to leave without recognizing them as an official government.
"You know, we’ve got to have a plan to contain terrorism, we’ve got to have a plan to get these Americans and our allies to safety," said Moulton. "We’ve got to have a plan to simply take care of the over 120,000 refugees that we evacuated but are stuck in refugee camps, in many cases without food and water to survive. That’s another anything thing that Representative Meijer and I witnessed on our trip when we went to Qatar after Kabul. We’ve got a looming humanitarian crisis on the ground there."